The Fairview Research analyst company announced within its IFI Claims Patent Services division an analysis of granted patents in the U.S. for the last year. Over the last twenty years, including 2012, first place is firmly held by IBM, which is also the last year record holder. They scored a personal record of 6478 obtained patents within one year. Of the total number, two hundred of them are related to security technologies to which IBM has recently payed more and more attention.

In second place is the South Korean technology giant Samsung with 5081 patents obtained, a top-five list continues with Canon (3174), Sony (3032) and Panasonic with 2769 obtained patents in the last year. Google and Apple are only at 21 and 22 place at the 1151 and 1136 patents. Google records 170 percent increase compared to 2011 and Apple's got 68% more patents comparing to the same period last year. A complete list of the first fifty companies by number of patents in the U.S. over the last year can be found here.

[Ed – These numbers might not seem important until you remember that Apple recently made a public claim that they did not want to be the innovator for the whole world. Considering their place in the number of patents granted it seems they are not even remotely the world's inovative force. Instead they usually tend to be the guy that tries to patent things someone else invented with a new twist. Overall IBM is and has been one of the driving forces in technological innovation for the last 20 years...]

What do you think about this? Tell us in our Forum