The 2023 FedInvent Roundup
The 2023 FedInvent Roundup
We're Back With Lots of Statistics
Happy 2024 from FedInvent!
We're Back!
First, we want to thank our subscribers who stuck with us while we undertook a significant effort to improve the FedInvent Portfolio of taxpayer-funded US patents. We thank our families for putting up with our relentless quest for better data especially when our efforts spilled over to the middle of the night.
This newsletter is a little long but packed with new information on how the federal innovation intellectual property ecosphere performed in 2023.
First, here is the link to the 2023 FedInvent Reports for each week in 2023.
The first FedInvent Report for 2024 patents is here. The first report on 2024 Pre-grant Publication of Patent Applications is here.
The FedInvent Portfolio
The FedInvent portfolio of taxpayer-funded inventions and patents from intramural research funded by federal agencies is an impressive and expansive collection. There are over 122,000 taxpayer-funded patents granted between 2005-2023. Another 164 patents were granted on the first Tuesday of 2024. Most of the 122,000 plus taxpayer-funded patents in the FedInvent portfolio are still enforceable.
Unlike those created by American inventors that didn't receive federal funding, these patents are the outcome of America's science and technology policy. The patents are an indicia of intent to commercialize an invention or to at least try. Knowing how the money flowed and what we got for it is important.
According to the Congressional Research Service's Federal Research and Development (R&D) Funding: FY2024 report, President Biden's budget proposal for FY2024 includes approximately $209.7 billion for R&D, $8.9 billion (4.4%) above the FY2023 estimated level of $200.8 billion. Adjusted for inflation to FY2024 dollars, the President's FY2024 R&D proposal represents a constant-dollar increase of 2.4% above the FY2023 actual level. Funding for R&D is concentrated in a few federal departments and agencies. In FY2023, six agencies received nearly 95% of total federal R&D funding, with the Department of Defense (DOD, 46.2%) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS, 24.0%) combined accounting for more than 70% of all federal R&D funding. In the FY2024 proposal, the top six R&D agencies would account for nearly 95%, with DOD accounting for 45.8% and HHS for 24.3%.
FedInvent wants to know which inventions inventors (and patent examiners) think are novel, useful, non-obvious, and worthy of commercialization. Taxpayers spend a lot of money.
Bayh-Dole Data Cleanup
US patent data remains one of the most complex and least accessible federal data collections. The FedInvent team is working to make this data usable by regular taxpayers, not just by patentistas and the patent attorney and technology transfer tribe. To achieve that goal, we did a lot of cleaning up and a lot of research to figure out who funded the R&D that led to the inventions.
It's challenging to figure out what is misinformation, what is disinformation, or what is just data created by software that erases all the leading zeros (Calling NIH and NSF.)
According to the American Psychological Association, misinformation is false or inaccurate information—getting the facts wrong. In the FedInvent world, misinformation covers bad contract numbers, citing the NIH telephone number instead of a grant number and other practices that lead to bad data and unfindable funding sources.
Disinformation is false information deliberately intended to mislead—intentionally misstating the facts. There is plenty of disinformation in the patent data. There are plenty of scofflaws who can execute billion-dollar contracts to build state-of-the-art jets, tanks, and cyber security tools but don't provide complete contract information — defense contractor scofflaws, companies working for the Intelligence Community who suddenly forget how to create a government interest statement (that's you IBM Watson inventors who are working for the spy guys), and R&D fraudsters who have groups of patents where not a single government interest statement has a findable or real contract number.
Heads Down
For the last six months, we've been working with our data. We are building portfolios for agencies where we've fixed the contract numbers, researched the goofy stuff, and mapped contracts to funders deeper within the funding organization. We wanted more than "we got a contract from a government agency that has some kind of rights to the invention." We also have been working on our portfolio so we can answer your questions about the state of the intellectual property portfolio funded by taxpayers.
2023 Year-End Roundup
The first FedInvent 2024 newsletter reports on what went on in the federal innovation ecosphere in 2023. We're answering some questions that our new and improved data lets us report on. Here we go.
In 2023, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted 341,559 patents as of this report. USPTO hasn't published its official count yet. So, for now, we're using the week-by-week number from the patent file USPTO releases every Tuesday morning.
Of these patents, 6,977 reflected taxpayer support through grants and contracts presented in the government interest statements or intramural research where the inventors are federal employees.
Patents By the Funding Department
The table below shows the number of patents with citations from each federal department.
Patent Grants and Contracts Counts
Four thousand two hundred ninety-eight (4,298) patents cited a single grant or contract. One thousand nine hundred one (1901) cited two or more grants. Seven hundred seventy-eight (778) cited no grants or contracts. Twelve (12) patents cited ten or more grants.
Of the 778 patents with no grant or contract number, 751 are patents that result from intramural research, research performed by government employees. The rest have no contracts and a government assignee. The rest are patents where we were unable to definitively confirm that the patent was the result of discoveries made by government employees.
And the Winner Is…
The 2023 Patent With the Most Grant Citations
The 2023 patent with the most citations was 11798179, awarded to a team of Case Western Reserve University inventors. The patent cites 17 grants. One grant is from the Department of Veterans Affairs. There are 11 from NIH, including six from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), two from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), two from the National Eye Institute, and one from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. The final NIH grant cites a $900,000 grant awarded in 1997 for Biomedical Engineering Research Facilities from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR). NIH abolished NCRR in December 2011 as part of an NIH reorganization to create the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). Unlike the National Science Foundation, NIH doesn't reassign its grants to new organizations when it reorganizes. The Department of Defense Congressional Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP), operated by the US Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC), funded the final three grants cited on this patent.
What's past is prologue? The same team at Case Western Reserve received patent 11361437, the 2022 patent with the most contract citations.
The Health Complex
In 2023, 2,466 patents identified the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the source of funding for the patent. The National Institutes of Health funded 2,425 of these patents. The table below outlines the institutes on the 8,000 individual NIH grants citations on 2023 taxpayer-funded patents.
The Nexus of the Health Complex and the Military Health Complex
In 2023, 135 patents had grant citations from both DOD and NIH. Fifty-eight patents cited grants funded under the DOD Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP).
The Army Medical Research and Development Command contracts funded one hundred forty-four (144) patents. Ninety-two of these grants were awarded under CDMRP. The balance are funded by a combination of SBIR/STTR grants, fellowships, and other DOD military medical research programs.
FedInvent has identified 176 patents granted in 2023 that are classified as part of the Military Medical Complex. These patents cover a range of military medical-related inventions, including tools for combating bioweapons, vaccine technologies for bacterial pathogens, treatments for burn injuries, and a range of devices and technology for prosthetics and ocular issues.
Higher Education Research and Development Institutions
In 2023, 56% of all patents citing taxpayer funding have at least one assignee that is a college or university. Here are the top ten HERD recipients:
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SYSTEM — 282
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY —219
HARVARD COLLEGE —125
STANFORD UNIVERSITY — 109
PURDUE UNIVERSITY —103
UNIVERSITY TEXAS —96
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY —95
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN | WARF — 95
UNIVERSITY FLORIDA—91
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY—88
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers
We have a little more work to do in digging out all of the patents funded by FFRDCs. So far, we're up to 743. Our contract number whispers are on the job.
Small Business R&D
In 2023, 460 patents cited funding under a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) or a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program designed to encourage domestic small businesses to engage in Federal Research/Research and Development (R/R&D) with the potential for commercialization. These patents cite 687 SBIR or STTR grant numbers.
Fifty-six (56) of the SBIR/STTR patents have at least one assignee that is a higher education entity. SBIRs funded thirty-seven (37) patents. The FedInvent question? How grants awarded to small businesses wound up assigned to MIT, Penn State, University of South Carolina, and University of Maryland Baltimore, to name a few. College professor LLCs? Subcontracts to university researchers?
The Invention's Scientific Domains — USPTO Tech Centers
Return of the Pie Charts
The chart below shows how the 2023 utility patents break down by USPTO Technology Center.
The remaining patents were design patents, plant patents, and several reissue patents.
There is no dramatic change from the 2022 breakdown.
Next Up: National Science Foundation
FedInvent finished its analysis of the intellectual property portfolio funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). We analyzed 15,936 patents that reported funding from NSF. In our next newsletter, we’ll tell you what we found.
Thanks for reading FedInvent We're glad to be back.
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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.