Orange County businesses and inventors saw a 14% jump in the number of patents awarded last year, outpacing a nationwide uptick by 10-fold.
Local entities were awarded a total of 2,709 patents, which accounts for about 1% of the 246,698 patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office last year.
That’s roughly on par with the county’s share of the national population.
The reason for OC’s much larger share of the national pie when it comes to the increase in patents in 2011 remains a matter of speculation even among experts in the field.
“That was strange to me,” said Bruce Itchkawitz, a patent attorney at Irvine-based Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear LLP, the largest law firm based here. “You could say that the fact that OC is heavily weighted in the electronics and medical-device areas might have been a factor.”
Familiar Faces
Technology, medical devices and drug-making are leading segments of the local economy that count patents and other intellectual property as key assets.
Itchkawitz regularly breaks down data on patents for Orange County companies for his OC TechInnovation blog. The U.S. Patent Office has not yet compiled similar data for individual markets across the U.S. for 2011, making a current comparison between OC and other areas with significant industry clusters unavailable.
The totals for patents here clearly reflect steady gains by big companies in key industries, with Irvine-based chipmaker Broadcom Corp. leading the pack by a wide margin. Broadcom accounted for 40% of the county’s total with 1,074 patents, up 24% from 2010.
Next to Broadcom was Irvine-based drug maker Allergan Inc., which received 133 patents in 2011, up 21%.
Irvine-based disk-drive maker Western Digital Corp. was third with a 22% jump on 86 new patents.
Others
The rest of the field in OC still outpaced the national trend by more than four-fold, combining for a 6% increase, to 1,416 patents. Leaders among the rest of the field include a number of locally based companies from beyond the technology and medical device segments.
Foothill Ranch-based sunglasses and apparel maker Oakley Inc. got 24 patents last year, placing 12th locally.
BSH Home Appliances Corp. in Irvine received 23 patents last year, ranking 13th.
BSH is a subsidiary of Munich-based BSH Bosch and Siemens Home Appliances Group. It manufactures high-end home appliances and sells under the Bosch, Thermador and Gaggenau brands in the U.S.
The U.S. patent office recently began accepting requests for faster examination of applications, following the passage of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act last September.
The priority program, dubbed “TrackOne,” allows for a faster processing of patent applications for a fee.
One of the major provisions in the America Invents Act is a change from giving priority to applicants who are “first to invent” to those who are “first to file.”
First to File
The first-to-file provision won’t not take effect until March, 2013, but some other changes will kick in this year.
“What will be effective this year is the new post-grant review system,” Itchkawitz said. “It will bring new ways a patent could be challenged short of litigation. There may be a jump of applications filed, as people might flurry to file before these changes occur.”
Newport Media
Lake Forest-based chipmaker Newport Media Inc.—which 38 patents in 2011 to place among the top 15 in OC—is making plans to prepare for upcoming changes in patent law.
“We’re looking at provisional filings as an alternative,” Chief Executive Mohy Abdelgany said. “I think the ‘first-to-file’ provision is a fair thing to do, but we as a small company are obviously affected by that.”
Newport Media employs about 220 people, with about 50 in OC and the rest in offices in South Korea, Egypt, China and Brazil.
Provisional Applications
A provisional application requires no formal claims or disclosure statements, and acts as a placeholder. It establishes an early effective filing date and gives the applicant one year to follow up with a full application.
“We give a great deal of incentives to employees who file patents,” Abdelgany said. “We have a limitation on how much money we spend on patents. Provisional applications are a lower-cost option that still preserves a date. They’re hundreds of dollars instead of the thousands for normal filings.”
