The 2022 Numbers Are In. The Feds Win.
The FedInvent 2022 Recap and 2023 FedInvent Reports
Happy 2023 from FedInvent,
We're back with the 2022 round-up. Since our last newsletter, we've been digging through every 2022 taxpayer-funded patent and patent applications to see what we got for our taxpayer money. Today's newsletter is the recap. A deeper dive will be appearing in upcoming newsletters.
As usual, we start with the links to the FedInvent Reports. You can access the 2022 reports here. The first FedInvent Reports of 2023 can be accessed here.
2023 is poised to be an interesting year in the federal innovation ecosphere. The Biden Administration funded over $200 billion in R&D spending for GFY 2023. A lot of scientists, patent attorneys, and technology transfer professionals spent 2022 and part of 2021 away from their labs and offices with lots of time to craft patent claims in between episodes of Friends. And the 117th Congress funded every R&D project in sight —infrastructure, semiconductors, biofoundries, and manufacturing technology. Watch this space. It’s going to be an interesting year.
But first, 2022.
Shockwaves In the Patent Ecosphere
Shockwaves are rippling through the patent ecosphere. After 29 straight years, IBM has lost its Master of the Patent Universe status as the number one recipient of US patents. IFI Claims, the purveyor of patent data, reported the 2022 year-end US patent recipient lineup. With 6,248 US patent grants, Samsung came in first, and IBM moved to the number two position at 4,398. According to Barron's, IBM reported that this reduction in patent activity was by design. Its focus is on research on artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity, semiconductors, and quantum computing. IFI Claims also reported that five of the top six firms receiving US patents were Asian electronics makers. Good for them.
7,047 Taxpayer-Funded Patents
The FedInvent team almost missed the news. We were busy analyzing and refining the 2022 data on taxpayer-funded patents to dig up every possible inventor who received a taxpayer-funded patent in 2022. We wanted to see how close the FedInvent count could get to the IBM Master of the Universe count. We were as surprised as anyone by the fall of IBM from the top spot. But FedInvent has some of its own news. An organization that funded over $171 billion in R&D in 2022 but makes nothing racked up 7,047 patents that received taxpayer funding.
Yes, your read that right, 7,047 taxpayer-funded patents. If you count all of the patents that resulted from federal money, the Feds funded 799 more patents than Samsung and 2,649 more than IBM.
What FedInvent Counts
What do we count? Patents with government interest statements indicating taxpayer funding and patents assigned to a US government entity. Then we add patents we find among the lists and materials published by government technology transfer organizations and some random patents where the contract information is in the wrong place in the patent text. We also count the US Postal Service's inventions. As long as they get federal dollars, FedInvent will count their patents and patent applications.
This year we got better at digging out patents from programs like Manufacturing USA and other federally funded research institutions and patents from the federal Other Transaction Authority (OTA) programs. OTA-funded inventions are undercounted. Many of these patents don't have government interest statements. But we're relentless. We intend to find them.
FedInvent is working on a detailed analysis of the 2022 taxpayer-funded patents. The plan is to report on the detailed results in upcoming FedInvent newsletters. In the meantime, here is the 2022 Recap.
The 2022 FedInvent Portfolio Recap
The 2022 FedInvent Portfolio has 7,047 patents. These patents have 8,100 department-level funding citations. Many inventors receive funding from more than one department. For example, there are 166 patents where inventors received funding from both the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The Big Eight
Eight federal agencies receive 97% of federal R&D funding. Here is how this breaks down between the big eight recipients of taxpayer funding.
Here is the Big Eight patent count.
The Top Ten
Two other entities came had made the top ten.
The top ten 2022 patent recipients include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Postal Service (USPS). Neither entity appears in reports on annual federal R&D funding. Both entities own the majority of the patents that come from the R&D it funds.
This year has been another big year for the mobile identity crew at TSA. TSA received patents for everything from validating your identity using a mobile driver's license on your smartphone to validating your identity for your online dating and medical records. DHS also received a host of patents covering explosive detection and mechanisms for improved screening of passengers, luggage, and cargo.
The question for patent maximalists is what happens when the feds own significant patents for identification management technology. Will match.com or your bank need to license DHS technology for mobile applications?
The Postal Service's innovations deal with how to remain relevant in the era of digital everything. USPS is giving DHS a run for the money in mobile and identity technology. The Postal Service is also working on stopping check-altering mail thieves who are stealing checks out of a mailbox and using digital bank deposit software to help themselves to your money. USPS applied for a patent on its Chute Lockout Device.
On another note, we checked the status of USPS's patent application for a "Closure Member Stop," aka a door stop. It still hasn't been examined. You can read "The Case of the Closure Member Stop" here.
The Technology Center View
In the world of patents, the Technology Center, where a patent was examined, is a reliable view of the technology domain covered by the patent claims. Here is the Technology Center view of the 2022 FedInvent patents.
There are also 11 design patents examined in Technology Center 2900 and ten patents that were examined by Technology Center 3900, Reexaminations.
Who Got the Patents?
Here’s a recap on some of the entities that received taxpayer-funded patents in 2022.
Colleges and Universities: 4,090
Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) entities, colleges, and universities are the largest recipient of FedInvent patents. The 2022 patent count is 4,090. Fifty-eight percent (58%) of the 2022 patents had one or more assignees affiliated with a university, college, or post-doctoral research center. The 2022 patent count is lower than the 2021 count of 4,158 patents.
In 2022, the University of California system received 334 taxpayer-funded patents. Johns Hopkins University received 89 patents. Harvard College and Harvard Medical School affiliated entities received 313. MIT and MIT-affiliated entities received 216. Duke University received 59 taxpayer-funded patents in 2022. (The details of how the HERD performed this year are in the works. Please stay tuned.)
Only 22 patents are assigned to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Morehouse School of Medicine received seven; Tuskegee University received five; Meharry Medical College and North Caroling A&T State University each received three. Howard University received two 2022 patents. Jackson State and Morgan State received one patent each.
Federally Funded R&D Centers (FFRDCs): 715
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers are an assignee or applicant on 715 patents. The FFRDC patents include 312 associated with academic-affiliated FFRDCs and 403 patents granted to industry-affiliated FFRDCs. FFRDC patents hide in plain sight, with many being assigned directly to the university they are affiliated with and no government interest statement to indicate that an FFRDC contract funded the inventors.
Companies: 1,801
In 2022 1,801 taxpayer-funded patents are owned by commercial entities — corporations, LLCs, limited partnerships, and foreign companies. It breaks down as follows:
Corporations — 1449
Limited Liability Companies (LLC) — 298
Foreign Companies — 74
Limited Partnerships — 21
The patents assigned to foreign companies raise an interesting question. If these foreign companies commercialized the technology in these US taxpayer-funded patents, will the products that use the invention be manufactured in the US? (Our bet is no.)
America's Seed Fund SBIR/STTR Grants: 261
Free money from America's Seed Fund, SBA, funded 261 Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and STTR contracts identified on 2022 patents. SBIR grant funding is among the best seed funding an entrepreneur can get. The firm receives funding without coughing up any equity. An SBIR grant involves a rigorous process for explaining in writing what your company does, the market value of the product you are developing, and how you intend to commercialize it. Facts and figures not flashy pitch decks.
The average Phase 1 SBIR is $150,000 over six months, with total SBIR funding at $225,000. According to the RePort NIH Data Book, the average NIH grant is $592,617.
Here's a sample of the inventions that these SBIRs funded.
A portable oxygen concentrator funded by HHS and NSF.
Wide field of night vision technology funded by the Navy because the Army isn't the only branch of the service that owns the night.
Crowd sourced mapping with robust structural features that use mobile phones or robots to map the inside of buildings funded by DOD and NSF.
Loci Controls, a company focused on building novel systems for extracting landfill gas, received four patents from two SBIRs funded by NSF — 11235361, 11273473, 11484919, and 11491521.
National Science Foundation SBIR/STTR grant was cited as the funding source on 107 patents; DOD funded 102; HHS funded 38; DOE funded 25; and NASA funded 10.
HHS SBIR/STTRs are undercounted. Patent contract citations for NIH and other HHS entities have a high incidence of incomplete and inaccurate contract numbers limiting visibility into which inventors received funding courtesy of America's Seed Fund.
Like everything else in the patent world, inventors can cite more than one SBIR or STTR on their patent applications.
The Bayh-Dole Scofflaws: 82
In 2022 there were 82 Bayh-Dole scofflaw patents. The FedInvent Bayh-Dole scofflaw patents are taxpayer-funded patents that didn't have the contract and department information required to retain the title to inventions made while working on a federal contract, grant, or cooperative agreement by the Bayh-Dole Act. These are the patents where the FedInvent team couldn't map a patent back to a definitive contract.
Of the 82 scofflaw patents, 65 went to defense contractors. Raytheon holds the number one position with 37 patents, 45% of the total. Rampart Communications, a company that supports the National Security Agency and has no findable federal contracts of any kind but is a member of the Fort Meade Alliance, received four patents in 2022 for advanced communications technology that acknowledge a government interest in the inventions.
The IBM Watson research fellows working with document and language processing inventions are most likely working with the intelligence community to help them ingest and understand massive amounts of text to build actionable intelligence. Besides, we know that IBM knows how to write a correct government interest statement. IBM received 79 taxpayer-funded patents in 2022. Seventy-six had contract information. Three did not. Interestingly, most of the IBM patents were for the technologies that IBM is now focused on: artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity, semiconductors, and quantum computing.
Dear Scofflaws,
If you are making gas turbine engines, building hypersonic air-breathing weapons technology, or advanced communications and "projectile" technology, also known as missiles, it's easy to assume you are getting federal money from DOD. Ditto with all those quantum computing inventions coming out of Maryland, the DOD, and the IC. One more thought, if you don't want the Chinese to know what you're up to don't patent your inventions.
Respectfully,
FedInvent
A New DOD University Affiliated Research Center
Howard University, Washington, DC, will be awarded a $90,000,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for research and development. The contract will establish a Historically Black Colleges and Universities-led University Affiliated Research Center consortium to execute research focused on tactical autonomy that will aid in the transition of research into practical applications. Work under this agreement will be performed at Howard University's facility and consortium members' campuses. The funding runs through January 31, 2028. Funds will be obligated on individual task orders issued against the indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract. If you're new to the UARC game, this means statements of work need to be crafted for work to get funded.
Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Office of Scientific Research allocated $2,967,271 in government fiscal year 2023 research and development funds to get the party started. We look forward to more patents and patent applications from HBCUs and their partners.
Before We Go
We can’t stop ourselves.
The USPTO has some of the top experts in the world on the state of the art is in EVERY technology on Earth. That expertise includes computer science, how to make computers in the cloud run fast, and how to cache text for download to a browser. Apparently, that knowledge doesn’t extend to the folks building USPTO’s public-facing patent search tools. We’re doing a little research on patent 11214780 — Nucleobase Editors And Uses Thereof — and we get this.
Who’s system’s performance will this degrade? It took two seconds to load the text. Is this some leftover 1995 message? Come on USPTO. Fix this thing.
Coming Soon…
FedInvent is working on a detailed analysis of the 2022 taxpayer-funded patents. The plan is to report on the detailed results in upcoming FedInvent newsletters. In the meantime, here is the 2022 Recap.
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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. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.