Word: patent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While the Japanese are in the forefront of the foreign charge on the U.S. patent office, they are not alone. Foreigners obtained 47% of American patents in fiscal year 1987, up from 34% in 1977. The Japanese led with 17,288 patents in 1987, a 25% increase over 1986. Last year the Japanese held 19% of all U.S. patents. In 1987 West Germany, led by Siemens, grabbed 8,030 patents, up 15% over 1986, and France received...
Among individual companies, Japan's Canon, a manufacturer of cameras, printers and copiers, has been outstanding. In the past decade the firm has pushed its annual U.S. patent total from 158 to 887. During the same period, the annual number of patents issued to General Electric fell from...
...numbers are real warnings," says Francis Narin, president of Computer Horizons, a consulting firm that did the patent study for the NSF. "We're in danger of losing our technological edge. We've gone soft." Herbert Wamsley, executive director of the Intellectual Property Owners, a trade group representing inventors, agrees. Says he: "The level of patenting is a sign of ) corporate virility. This is yet one more indication that America's technological leadership is slipping...
Some executives dispute such interpretations of the Government data. GE argues that it would still rank as the patent leader if the Government had included patents granted to R.C.A., which GE acquired in 1986. Arno Penzias, vice president of research at AT&T Bell Laboratories and a Nobel laureate, says patents are not a reliable measure of basic research. Says he: "We have stuff in our labs that may not see the light of day for years. Because we haven't patented it, does that mean it's not worthy science?" Also, companies often decide against registering an important invention...
Even so, the new NSF study cannot be dismissed lightly. In the first attempt to measure the quality of patents, Computer Horizons examined how often they were cited in applications filed by later inventors. The assumption of the study: when a patent is cited frequently, that means it has had a significant impact on subsequent research. By this standard, the Japanese come out ahead. In a ranking based on how often their patents are cited, Japanese inventors scored 26% higher than their American counterparts...