Patent News


Jul. 25, 2014

InTheCapital: These 3 Local Universities Were Granted the Most U.S. Patents Worldwide in 2013, by Molly Greenberg

This article originally appeared in InTheCapital on July 25, 2014.


The Intellectual Property Owners (IPO) recently published a list of the top 100 universities worldwide granted U.S. patents in 2013, and among them were three local schools: Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia.

Johns Hopkins ranked No. 20 with 82 patents, UMD came in at No. 38 with 51 and UVa secured the No. 81 slot with 25.

These three local institutions weren’t the only universities in the country that made the cut. In fact, when it comes to the top 100 patent-owning universities across the globe, 62 percent are located in the U.S. and 18 percent hail from China. The American schools with the largest amount of patents to boast of are both public and private, range from small to large and represent a whole slew of states across the nation. They’re a diverse set of institutions looking to change the world one proprietary invention at a time, and they’re succeeding in doing just that.

Consider the University of California system, for instance. It had more patents granted in 2013 – 399 – than any other university in the world, according to IPO. MIT followed close behind with 281 patents, Stanford University at 170 and the University of Texas with 169.

As pointed out by Patent Docs, undisclosed in this report is any correlation between the number of patents and amount of grant money was acquired by each institution. These results, Patent Docs went on to say, support the idea that “universities should concentrate on patenting fulfilling the statutory mandate to facilitate technology transfer and commercialization and less on university tech transfer offices being a profit center for their universities.”

To read the full post, please visit the InTheCapital website here.