PatentWorld
By Saerom (Ronnie) Lee, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Explore 50 years of global innovation through 9.36M US patents. From the microchip revolution to the AI era, discover how technology, geography, and human ingenuity have shaped the world.
Explore the Data
The Innovation Landscape
How has the pace and nature of patenting changed since 1976?
The Technology Revolution
Which technologies are rising, and which are fading?
Who Innovates?
From IBM to Samsung: who holds the patents, and how has that changed?
The Inventors
Team sizes, gender trends, and the most prolific inventors.
The Geography of Innovation
Innovation hubs from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen.
Collaboration Networks
How do firms and inventors collaborate? Network analysis reveals the hidden structure of innovation.
The Knowledge Network
Citations, government funding, and the flow of knowledge.
Innovation Dynamics
Grant lag, cross-domain convergence, global collaboration, and the velocity of innovation.
Patent Quality
Forward citations, originality, generality, and other dimensions of patent quality over 50 years.
Patent Law & Policy
Major legislation, Supreme Court decisions, and policy changes that have shaped the US patent system.
Artificial Intelligence
How AI patenting has evolved from early expert systems to the deep learning and generative AI era.
The Green Innovation Race
Green patents grew from a trickle to a torrent. Who leads the race to decarbonize, and where is AI meeting climate?
The Language of Innovation
Topic modeling and semantic analysis of 9.36 million patent abstracts reveals emerging themes, technology convergence, and the novelty of invention.
About the Data
PatentWorld analyzes every patent granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1976 to 2025. The data comes from PatentsView, a platform supported by the USPTO that disambiguates and links patent data. Our analysis covers 9.36 million US patents, their inventors, assignees, technology classifications, geographic origins, and citation networks.
Learn more about our methodology