Most companies would celebrate having one patent approved a year. IBM averaged more than 20 patents a day in 2014! Big Blue topped the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s list with 7,534 patents during the year. No company has ever garnered more than 7,000 patents in a single year. The next highest company was Samsung with 4,952 patents. Other leaders in the patent rankings for 2014 included Canon, Sony, Microsoft, Toshiba, Qualcomm, Google, LG Electronics, and Panasonic.
This is the 22nd year in a row that IBM has been the top company on the list of U.S. patent recipients. Since 1993, the company has received more than 81,500 U.S. patents. That is an impressing feat and reinforces the fact that IBM is always innovating. With 12 research labs located on six different continents, much of IBM’s patent success can be attributed to the global diversity of its researchers.
In 2014, IBM had many patents in the cloud, bid data and analytics, security, social, and mobile areas. A few of the more significant patents included ones for enabling service virtualization in a cloud, interactive analytics processing, mobile device validation, assessing social risk due to exposure from linked contacts, identifying whether an application is malicious, and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Will they top the list again in 2015?