Legal Research

Some rather unexpected statistics caught my attention. The first was in the university assignees category. Not surprisingly, US schools dominated the list. The top five included the Univ. of California (252), MIT (228), Stanford (137), Caltech (115), and Wisconsin (99). But just breaking into the top ten was Tsinghua University (60), one of China's leading universities. According to the school's website, Tsinghua has 44 research institutes, 9 engineering research centres and 163 laboratories, including 15 national laboratories. And #24 was the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. This seems to confirm a trend noted by the WIPO and other organizations: patent activity in Asia is increasing rapidly. It's nice to see American universities getting some competition.

(The USPTO also produces a statistical report on academic patenting, but it only includes U.S. colleges and universities and was last updated in 2006.)

Full post as published by The Patent Librarian's Notebook on February 12, 2009 (boomark / email).