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BusinessWeek magazine published a study which ranks the 25 companies with the Most Valuable Patent Portfolios. The study was performed using the Ocean Tomo PatentRatings ® system which measures patents by their value.
The intellectual-property consulting firm sorted through U.S. patents granted to the world’s 1,000 biggest companies (by revenue) from 2005 to 2009. Ocean Tomo then assessed the patents’ value by tallying, among other things, patent filing trends, litigation rates, and how many times each was cited by other applicants or in scientific and technical journals. The data were aggregated into a patent value index number and ranking.
The study concludes that although IBM has been granted more U.S. patents than any other applicant (4,914 in 2009), its collection over the past five years ranks only eighth in value. No. 1 is Microsoft, which ranked third, with 2,906 patents issued last year.
“Ranking companies based on their patent value is critical, as not all patents are created equally,’ states Jonathan Barney, PatentRatings system inventor and Ocean Tomo Managing Director, “Simply counting how many patents a firm holds can lead to a very misleading view.’
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- BusinessWeek – The World’s 25 Most Inventive Companies
- OT study ranks Top 25 Inventive Companies for Bloomberg Businessweek