Patents to Utahns drop 16.8%

The final patent numbers for 2005 are in.

A total of 749 patents were granted to Utah inventors in 2005, a drop of 16.8 percent from the 900 patents granted to Utahns in 2004. The total number of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office also declined sharply in 2005, though not quite as sharply as the drop in patents to Utahns. The office granted 157,882 patents in 2005, down 13 percent from the 181,443 patents it granted in 2004.

In 2003, a year in which 849 patents were garnered by Utah inventors, the annual number of patents granted to Utahns had declined for the second year in a row. The 849 patents granted to Utahns in 2003 were preceded by 875 patents in 2002, 917 patents in 2001, 875 patents in 2000, 870 patents in 1999 and 849 patents in 1998. The year 2001 set a record for patents granted to Utah inventors.

The economic recession of 2001 had been viewed as a primary reason for the drop in patent grants in 2002 and 2003, given the approximately two-year cycle between filing and issuance of the average patent. A year later, the robust showing of 900 patents to Utahns in 2004 had appeared to signal an end to the sub-800 annual patent totals for Utah inventors. However, the surprisingly low total of 749 patents granted to Utahns in 2005 represents the largest annual decline in patent grants to Utahns in decades. The 2005 Utah patent total is the lowest since 1996, a year in which 666 patents were granted to Utah inventors.

Darlene Slaughter, general manager of IFI Patent Intelligence, said in a Jan. 10 press release by Wolters Kluwer Health that the recent patent decreases are interesting because the overall number of patent applications is actually rising. "This leads us to believe that we're not experiencing a real crisis of innovation but rather an enormous backlog of (patent) applications being processed," Slaughter was quoted as saying. The USPTO had confirmed the backlog in previous months, citing an increasing complexity of patent applications as the primary reason.

Patent grants to Utahns had climbed steadily each year since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Utahns were typically granted about 200 patents annually. Since 1988, a year in which Utah inventors garnered 292 patents, Utahns' patent numbers increased annually until 2002, a span that involved sometimes dramatic annual increases reaching as high as 35 percent in some years.

Seventeen new patents were awarded to Utah inventors on Jan. 3, including: