Recently, I was going through some U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data on patenting and I was looking at patenting around the world. In the accompanying Figure One, I have plotted patent data from various nations over the last half century. It is a little difficult to interpret because it is on a log-linear scale. What you will notice is that the number of patents in the U.S. has roughly doubled over the last half century. Germany has also roughly doubled. Japanese patenting, on the other hand, has expanded enormously from 1963 through 2007 and then it continued to grow quite slowly. Taiwan and Korea began their rapid patenting growth in the 1980s. Korea is continuing to expand the number of patents filed quite rapidly in 2000. In contrast, Mexico has remained at roughly the same low level for the past half century. The new players are China and India, which have started from extremely low levels, but are expanding at an astonishing rate. This is interesting but not surprising.
When one looks at Table One, which depicts the number of patents per 10,000 persons, the data is even more interesting. Japan, the U.S., and Taiwan have roughly the same number of patents per person and Korea is not too far behind and will likely pull even with them within 10 years. However, China and India on a per capita basis trail these nations by three orders of magnitude. What if these two nations can improve their per capita performance to only one-tenth that of the more advanced nations? In sheer numbers, each of them will surpass Japan and rival the U.S.! If, as is entirely plausible, in three decades they become as innovative as Korea, they will produce more than twice as many patents as the U.S. Would this mean that centuries-long technological dominance of the Western European and European settler nations will be over?
How plausible is this scenario?
USPTO Patents per 10,000 Persons, 2007 (Total Number)
- U.S.    — 3.07 (93,691)
- Japan  — 2.81 (35,924)
- Taiwan — 3.26 (7,491)
- Korea — 1.51 (7,264)
- India   — .0051 (578)
- China  — .0057 (756)
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:38 am
I think I’d want more info about what kind of patents these countries are applying for… in some ways I would say the U.S. can’t be beat (say, technology), but in other fields some folks might be able to pull ahead.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:42 am
Hi Elizabeth,
I agree that many of these patents are probably relatively low tech. In the next couple of days I will post some further breakdowns. I don’t think there is anyone any longer that doubts that some of the Japanese patents are of the highest quality. In many fields, autos, elevators, high-speed trains, flat panel displays, etc. the Japanese are far, far ahead of the US…Notice I said in many not all!
The Taiwanese and Koreans are starting to get some relatively high-quality patents. Again trailing the Japanese by 20 years. What if the Chinese and Indians are trailing them by about 20 years. That means 20-30 years from now our children and students will be facing ferocious competition.
If you believe as I do that the US in particular has an ever deteriorating school system and that the desire among our students (and possibly those in other developed nations is not as great as it once was), the lead may be disappear even more quickly.
Regardless thanks for the comment, there is plenty of room for debate — and debate itself might help us identify what we need to do. I think nearly all of us believe we need to act (and I might say Canada certainly seems more aware and active than the US).
September 7th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Well, based on the number of Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists that work for American companies and whose work is probably counted incorrectly as American patents I would say India and China are on par with America in high technology. The American industry for the past 20 years or so have been driven by Indian and Chinese engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. The bottom line is that when these Indian and Chinese engineers return to India and China to work and start their own companies as they are doing now then America will have no technological lead since white Americans generally shun math, science, and technology fields.