World’s Top Five Patent Producers

As a follow-up to this recent post on historical U.S. patent activity, the chart above shows the annual number of patents for the top five patent-producing countries in 2009 over the period 1995-2009 (data here). Here are some interesting observations: 1. Following a ten-year period from 1998 to 2007 when the U.S. produced the most patents in the world, Japan took the number one...