U.S. Navy Ranks Third in the Number of Nanotechnology Patents

A study by researchers at the University of Arizona reports that the U.S. Navy ranks third, behind IBM and the University of California system, in the number of nanotechnology patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 1976-2006. Nanotechnology patents were identified by searching for certain keywords in the title or abstracts of published patents.

The Navy received 99 out of a total of 7,406 nanotechnology patents granted by the USPTO and NRL researchers were inventors on 70 of those patents. The researchers also identified the Navy, along with IBM and Eastman Kodak, as having been among the most active in patenting nanotechnology as far back as the 1970's.

The study, published in Nature Nanotechnology and funded by the National Science Foundation, found that the USPTO granted two times as many nanotechnology patents as the European Patent Office and over six times as many as the Japanese Patent Office during the same period. There is little overlap in the lists of institutions that received the most nanotechnology patents from the three offices.

(Link to study published in Nature Nanotechnology is: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n3/pdf/nnano.2008.51.pdf )