Life Sciences "Top 53"
Last week, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) and Harrity Analytics announced the release of the 37th annual list of the top 300 organizations receiving U.S. utility patents (see "Top 300 Organizations Granted U.S. Patents in 2019"). Patent Docs readers may recall that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office stopped releasing its annual list of top patent recipients in 2006 in order to "discourag[e] any perception that we believe more is better."
This year, the report was compiled in collaboration with Harrity Analytics, based on data obtained from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The IPO and Harrity Analytics noted that patents reported on the 2019 list are utility patents granted during the 2019 calendar year that listed the organization or a subsidiary as the owner on the printed patent document. Harrity Analytics then used organization and subsidiary data provided to two independent third-party data providers and reviewed over 200,000 assignments to attribute ownership to the correct organizations, where applicable. The report notes that patents that were granted to two or more organizations jointly are attributed to each organization separately, and that companies for which patents were granted to subsidiaries are combined with patents granted to the parent.
The IPO and Harrity Analytics also noted that 354,507 patents were issued in 2019, which was a 15.2% increase from the 307,759 patents that issued in 2018. The top fifteen companies on the IPO Top 300 are listed below (click on table to expand):
Dell, Qualcomm, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing fell out of the Top 15 in 2019. Dell dropped from 12th to 16th, Qualcomm dropped from 10th to 17th, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing dropped from 8th to 18th in 2019. Jumping into the Top 15 were Huawei (19th to 7th), Sony (18th to 11th), and Amazon (16th to 15th).
As in past years, Patent Docs used the IPO's list of top patent holders to compile a list of the top "life sciences" companies and organizations receiving U.S. utility patents in 2019. Each organization's IPO top 300 ranking for 2019 is indicated in the "2019 IPO Rank" column; the IPO top 300 ranking for 2018 (if available) is indicated in the "2018 IPO Rank" column; and the change in number of patents from 2018 is indicated in "% Change from 2018." The Life Sciences Top 53 is listed below (click on table to expand):
Please note that some of the companies and organizations listed above may be involved in work outside the life sciences sector, and therefore, a portion of the patents granted to these companies and organizations may be directed to other than life sciences-related inventions. Our list also includes medical device companies. In addition, the report indicates that the data for 2019 for each individual organization could be affected by mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, inconsistent treatment of subsidiaries in 2018 and 2019, and many other factors. Thus, while nine members of the Life Sciences Top 53 were not listed in the 2018 Top 300, they were not listed by the IPO and Harrity Analytics in the 2019 Top 300 as "new" additions to the list. These nine companies and organizations are indicated in the table above by an asterisk ("*") in the 2018 IPO Rank column to distinguish them from new additions to the list (listed as "new" in the same column).
