The 2024 FedInvent Rundown
6,881 Patents, 89% Of FedInvent Patents Were Funded By a Single Department
Happy New Year from FedInvent
We’ve been data wrangling and analyzing the data on federal innovations since our last newsletter.
Our latest series of newsletters is about what happened in the federal innovation ecosphere in 2024. This is the first.
Data From The Patents — Not From Agency Patent Lists
The FedInvent Project seeks to create a holistic view of the federally funded R&D that results in patentable inventions. FedInvent collects catalogs and reports on taxpayer-funded patents based on the information on the patent. The government interest statements and assignees provide a more complete view of who funded what grant and what grants led to patents.
Relying on lists of patents published by federal agencies only covers patents funded or owned by that agency. We love a good list, though. We use the lists as a quality assurance tool. This exercise helps us find patents that the agencies cite as receiving their funding but where the patent doesn’t have any federal funding information. (More on what we find and the shortcomings of Certificates of Correction later.)
The analysis of the 2024 tax-payer funded patents was created using the data extracted from the data published on US patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office and some serious FedInvent elbow grease to research any government interest statement mumbo-jumbo.
The FedInvent 2024 Rundown
In 2024, 6,881 patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) indicated that the inventors received taxpayer funding. The 6,881 patent count includes patents with government interest statements and patents that are assigned to one or more federal agencies.
The 6,881 FedInvent patents granted in 2024 are 96 patents less than the 2023 count of 6,977 patents. The patents granted in 2024 contain 9,606 contracts or grants as the funding source.
Eighty-nine percent (89%) of these patents cited grants and contracts from a single federal department. Inventors appear to stay in their lane when seeking federal grants and contracts.
Seven hundred sixty-seven (767) of these patents resulted from intramural research by scientists, researchers, and other innovators who work for a federal agency. FedInvent counts a patent in its intramural count if one or more of the inventors is a federal employee.
The following table presents the patent count by federal department, the count of patents funded by a single department, and the number of intramural patents awarded to each department. Intramural patents are patents that are the result of work by researchers and scientists that work for the federal government.
The Department of Veterans Affairs
We’re Working On It
Eighty-two (82) patents identify the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) as a funder or an assignee. Twenty-five of these patents have no government interest statements and have DVA as an assignee. Only nine of these patents have a DVA as a sole assignee. One patent has both DVA and HHS as assignees.
Some of the grants cited in the DVA patents with government interest statements cite grants that NIH awarded to DVA. Some of the grants have NIH activity codes that NIH states are, "Non-HHS Federal Awards Non-HHS Research Projects. To support research projects of non-DHHS entities. For the VA, this will be used for intramural research projects." Intramural research projects for who? NIH researchers working with DVA? DVA researchers?
Other patents with DVA grant numbers appear to be long-term funding agreements between researchers working on infectious disease research at NIH and researchers at VA hospitals, a natural nexus for this research.
The bottom line on DVA is that we need to do more analysis to accurately report on their patents and avoid an outbreak of overcounting. Please stay tuned.
The Best of The Rest
Here are some highlights on departments with a lower count of taxpayer-funded patents in 2024.
DOJ — The Department of Justice (DO)J) funded seven patents in 2024. Four were the work of FBI employees. Three are a collaboration between scientists funded by DOJ and scientists funded by DOD that produced patents for projectiles, training tools for canine detection of bioweapons and explosives, and a wonky deep learning patent with lots of complicated formulas.
EPA - The Environmental Protection Agency funded 13 patents granted in 2024. The inventions include detection of lead in water; thermochanochemical waste treatment for processing PFAS-contaminated waste; and antimicrobial surface systems to name a few.
Smithsonian Institution — The Smithsonian received two patents. The first is a design patent for Label Rail Assembly (D1055317) was invented by Graham Kopp, Head of Exhibitions & Facilities at the Smithsonian Institution. The second patent, 11908637, "SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR A REPLACEMENT TOUCHLESS BUTTON", a patent for a Touchless Button to initiate an interactive display. This invention was born in the COVID era as a way to enable visitors with disabilities, wheelchairs or prosthetics to activate the exhibit. The inventors point out that this invention may also be used for other environments where push buttons are needed to operate elevators, open doors, or operate lighting. (Remember all those pandemic-era elevator rules?) Congratulations to them.
AID — The Agency for International Development funded three patents. A patent on drip irrigation (11937556). A patent on surface decontamination (12116554) that changes color to indicate its efficacy and a patent for an electrostatic probe for handling an insect specimen (12130215).
Treasury — Treasury funded one patent for an anti-counterfeiting invention (11861966) from Wavefront Technology.
The Technology Centers
The charts that follow show the technology breakdown of FedInvent patents granted in 2024, organized by Technology Center. The Technology Center assigned to a patent determines which group of patent examiners actually examine a patent application.
Technology Centers that handle utility patents were responsible for the decision to grant a patent for 6,830 patents in 2024. Other Technology Centers handled fifty-one (51) patents. Here are the details.
2900 DESIGN PATENTS — 9
3900 CENTRAL REXAMINATION UNIT — 15
4100 PATENT TRAINING ACADEMY — 2
RH00 PATENTS — 25
THE RH00 Technology Center is a special-purpose internal R&D technology center focused on USPTO examination practices.
Departments With Over 1,000 Patents
The next set of charts breaks down the four departments that received over 1,000 patents in 2024: HHS, DOD, DOE, and NSF. The long and short of all of this is Material Science is hot.
The Deep Dives
Upcoming Newsletters
The Deep Diver is from US Patent 1370316 invented by Harry Houdini of Brooklyn, NY. The patent as granted on March 1, 1921. The legend is that Mr. Houdini invented the suit to support Navy divers.
In the upcoming newsletters, we’ll dig deeper into the outcomes for the biggest funders of federal R&D.
Next up is the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), where the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds 98.5% of the patents citing DHHS as the funder.
Next up after NIH is DARPA. An entity engaged in high-risk research and development that funds a lot of inventions.
Then, we’ll take a look at the National Science Foundation and the durability of its grants. In 2024, 13 of the patents it funded that were granted in 2024 cited grants issued before 2005. We look at the grants that keep on giving with lots of interesting inventions coming long after the grants were awarded.
Then comes Spooks and Scofflaws. This is an analysis of patents granted to US intelligence agencies, the Spooks. They invent a lot of interesting and a good amount of really scary stuff. And the Bayh-Dole Scofflaws. Patents with government interest that say, “A Classified Agency funded this patent.” These are the scofflaws. These are an interesting group of patents for gas turbine engines and hypersonic technology. By the way, the Chinese read patents too.
We’ll also do a deep dive into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) where over 66% of the patents it funded come from employees of the department. We’ll share what we’ve learned about DHS biometric patents and its mobile driver’s license patents.
Thanks for hanging in with us. We look forward to sharing what we’ve learned about the federal innovation ecosphere.
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