Counting Patents Is Hard Sometimes
FedInvent Patents for January 11, 2021
Hello from FedInvent,
It was a slow week in the federal innovation ecosphere. This week USPTO granted 5,563 new patents. Ninety-five (95) benefitted from taxpayer funding. There are still lots of interesting inventions in this week's mix.
For readers who prefer to start with the data, here is the link to the FedInvent Patent Report. If you like to browse by department, start here.
Year To Date Tabulations
We're working on adding year-to-date (YTD) totals in the FedInvent Reports. Today we added YTD data to the Count By Department panel.
The Bayh-Dole Scofflaws Are Back
Four of the taxpayer-funded patents granted on Tuesday didn't have the statutorily required data indicating the contract and agency that funded their work. We feel compelled to note that so far in 2022, we haven't had a Bayh-Dole scofflaw patent from Raytheon Technologies yet.
Tuesday's Bayh-Dole scofflaw patents are worth a look. You never know what inventions and inventors you'll find there hiding in plain sight.
The first, 11221436, assigned to Northrop Grumman, is for graphene and carbon nanotube sheet optical absorbers. Optical absorbers are used in a wide array of applications across the electromagnetic spectrum, including photovoltaic and photochemical cells, photodetectors, optical filters, stealth technology, and thermal light sources. This technology is also valuable in developing stealth, aerospace, and telescope technology. The inventors at Northrop Grumman notes that their invention is valuable in commercial state-of-art black paints. State-of-the-art black paints are used in space operations where coatings must have low outgassing characteristics while providing high thermal absorption properties.
Another defense contractor, BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems Integration Inc., received US Patent 11221792 for an efficient memory storage invention. Collins Aerospace sold its military Global Positioning System business to BAE as part of the United Technology acquisition by Raytheon Technologies. The inventor's bio shows he worked for Collins Aerospace. So it looks like this invention came from the folks who used to work at Collins.
IBM's Watson artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NPL) team received another patent for techniques for performing entity extraction, identification, and descriptions from a corpus of documents. This patent was funded by the same contract as the other document management/AI work. As usual, IBM has provided an unfindable contract number in the government interest statement of this patent. We assigned it under the AI IA category — artificial intelligence patents for an unnamed intelligence agency.
The final Bayh-Dole scofflaw patent is the most interesting. The patent is from Apple Inc. This patent, 11223036, "Interconnected silicon porous structure for anode active material," is for battery technology. The government interest statement has an unfindable contract number and no agency details. A closer look at the inventors yielded a path to figuring out who funded or supported this taxpayer-funded invention. The '036 patent has 15 inventors. Five of the inventors are battery experts from Apple. The other ten inventors are battery and materials experts who worked for the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL). The patent was a collaborative effort because it shows inventors from Apple and PNNL.
One of the PNNL inventors, energy storage expert Ji-Guang (Jason) Zhang, was named the 2019 Inventor of the Year by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Another of the ten PNNL inventors, Langli Luo, is now a professor at Tianjin University, China. When the patent application was filed, Dr. Luo was a post-doc researcher working at PNNL.
This invention may have been developed as part of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement or other research center agreement between Apple Inc. and the Lab. We're on the hunt but haven't found the contract yet. This patent is another example of the challenge of finding and counting taxpayer-funded inventions. We added this patent to our FFRDC count. Discovering how federal money leads to innovation often takes a circuitous route.
What Happened At The FFRDCs in 2021
We've started our analysis of the entire year of 2021 data on taxpayer-funded patents and patent applications. Our initial analysis of the 2021 taxpayer-funded data set identified 540 newly granted US patents where at least one assignee is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center. We haven't broken the numbers down between university-affiliated and industry-affiliated centers yet, but we're working on it.
One of the tricky issues when counting patents in general and taxpayer-funded patents, in particular, is figuring out which patents to count. Some of the FFRDC patents are easy to find. The FFRDC's name and the contract under which it operates are easily derived from the assignee name. Finding all of the FFRDC patents for the year is not as easy. Consider MIT Lincoln Lab. MIT owns all inventions resulting from research conducted at Lincoln Laboratory, so the assignee says Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT gets a lot of patents in any given year.
MITLL publishes an annual report which includes a list of their patents. The 2020 Annual Report notes that MITLL received 72 patents that year. The 2019 Report notes that the Lab received 65 patents. We were able to identify some of the 2021 MITLL patents based on inventor names and research publications, but we haven't found them all yet. Unfortunately, the 2021 annual report is not available yet. When it is, we'll update our count.
There are also fluid situations where inventors affiliated with FFRDCs appear on patents assigned to entities other than the FFRDC. Sometimes the funding agency wants the patent to be assigned to it directly. Like the Apple/PNNL patent, other patents have a government interest statement, but you won't know if an FFRDC was part of the mix unless you dig deeper into the data on the patent. We count the Apple patent with inventors from the Pacific Northwest National Lab as an FFRDC patent. Other's patent data practitioners might prefer a more pure count that only reflects patents assigned to the FFRDC itself.
A 2021 Report With 2017 Data
While analyzing the 2021 data, we wanted to see if we could find other data or reports to help validate our FFRDC numbers. We wanted to see how the previous year's counts aligned with our findings. The problem here is the age of the data that's available. The newest FFRDC patent-focused document was a 2021 technology transfer report from the Department of Commerce covering all federal labs. The report, "The Federal Laboratory Technology Transfer Fiscal Year 2017 Summary Report to the President and the Congress." contains data from 2017.
This report fulfills the requirement in 15 USC § 3710(g)(2) for an annual report summarizing the use of technology transfer authorities by federal agencies. It highlights the achievements of federal technology transfer and includes data on the use of specific transfer authorities. How does four-year-old data inform the President or Congress on trends in federal technology transfer, especially as the speed of innovation accelerates?
You can access the NIST report here.
Research and Development Needs Equipment
While hunting for all things related to federal R&D and innovation each week, we found this.
To execute R&D, researchers need testing capabilities and equipment. That includes research related to really big planes. A retired US Air Force B-52H Stratofortress nicknamed 'Damage Inc. II' was recently taken out of storage at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group's 'boneyard' at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. The plane was disassembled before beginning its journey eastward across the country. The plane will be partially reassembled for research and development purposes. The B-52 and its escorts take up two lanes of traffic, so they have to pull over every five miles or so to let traffic pass.
If you've ever been underneath the flight path of a B-52, you know how gigantic these planes are. They are an impressive addition to military air shows. Maybe the researchers will be using this B-52H to test the state-of-the-art black paint. A picture of the plane being moved is here courtesy of Flight Aware and The Drive. Driving past the Davis-Monthan boneyard is also very cool. Old and not so old planes are stored as far as the eye can see.
On to this week's numbers.
Patents By The Numbers
Here are the links to the Tuesday FedInvent Patent Report and to the Details Page that lets you browse by department.
This week USPTO granted 5,563 new patents. Ninety-five (95) benefitted from taxpayer funding. Here are the numbers.
Ninety-one (91) patents have Government Interest Statements.
Twenty (20) have an applicant or an assignee that is a government agency.
A federal department is the only assignee on 12 patents.
The 95 new patents have 106 department-level funding citations.
These patents are the work of 336 inventors.
The 326 American inventors come from 32 states.
The ten (10) foreign inventors come from six (6) countries.
There are 54 patents (57%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) received eight (8) patents.
Three patents were assigned Y CPC symbols indicating that the invention may be useful in mitigating the impact of climate change.
The Big Three States
California has 13 first-named inventors and 60 total inventors.
Massachusetts has 12 first-named inventors and 34 total inventors.
Pennsylvania has six (6) first-named inventors and 20 total inventors.
Patent Count By Department
Patents By Technology Center
The Technology Centers where the 95 patents granted this week were examined are in the chart below.
The Health Complex
The table below shows the number of funding citations where the recipient cites the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the institutes at the National Institutes of Health, and other subagencies that are part of HHS, the Health Complex.
Before We Go
This year, FedInvent is adding year-to-date counts and more graphics to the FedInvent Reports. As we noted above, we started with the Count By Department. Please stay tuned as we add more information to the 2022 reports.
As usual, there are many more taxpayer-funded patents than we can cover here. Please explore the FedInvent Patent Report. It's an important addition to your newsletter subscription.
If you'd like to catch up on earlier FedInvent Reports, you can access the newsletters here on Substack. In addition, the reports are available on the FedInvent Links page.
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As always, we thank you for reading FedInvent.
The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators.
Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.