Useful Stats: 2006 USPTO Patents per 100,000 Employees by State

Patent activity is a commonly used indicator of a state or region’s innovation capacity. SSTI has prepared a table illustrating the number of patents issued from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) per 100,000 employees for every state and the District of Columbia for each of the five years from 2002 to 2006. Additionally, the percent change in patents per employee over the five-year period was calculated. For the U.S. as a whole, including Puerto Rico and Guam, the per-employee number of patents rose 0.89 percent, from 75.7 patents per 100,000 workers in 2002 to 76.4 patents per worker in 2006.



The location of origin for each patent was determined by identifying the residence of the first-named inventor on the patent. In 2006, Idaho led the nation with 266.8 patents per 100,000 workers employed in the state. This was followed by California (161.5), Vermont (160.3), Oregon (149.2), and Massachusetts (136.7). The District of Columbia had the lowest number (10.3 patents), along with Mississippi, Alaska, West Virginia and Arkansas.



The state experiencing the largest increase of patents per employee was Washington, with a 46 percent increase from 2006 to 2002. This was followed by Oregon (36.8 percent), Massachusetts (14.1 percent), Kansas (13.4 percent) and California (12.9 percent). Idaho led the nation in patents per employee every year since 2002, but was among the states that had the largest decrease over five-year period.



SSTI's table is available at: http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/121907t.htm



Patent Counts by Country/State and Year was produced by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and is available at: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/cst_all.pdf