Interactive dashboards for 100 major patent filers
Interactive Company Profiles
Select a company below to explore its complete innovation profile. Each dashboard shows patent output, technology portfolio evolution, citation impact, team composition, and breadth of innovation over time. These profiles reveal the strategic fingerprint of each organization's R&D investment.
Annual Patent Output: Loading...
Utility patents granted per year for the selected company.
Annual patent counts reveal growth phases, strategic shifts, and the impact of economic cycles on corporate R&D output.
Technology Portfolio: Loading...
CPC section distribution over time showing how the company's technology focus has evolved.
Shifts in the CPC distribution signal strategic pivots -- a growing share in section H (Electricity) or G (Physics) often indicates a move toward digital and computing technologies.
Citation Impact: Loading...
Median 5-year forward citations per patent over time.
Citation trends reveal whether a company's patents are becoming more or less influential -- declining citations despite rising volume may signal a shift toward defensive or incremental patenting.
Team Size & Inventor Pool: Loading...
Average team size (left axis) and total active inventors (right axis) over time.
Growing team sizes alongside expanding inventor pools suggest increasing R&D investment, while rising team sizes with flat inventor counts indicate deepening specialization.
Technology Breadth: Loading...
Number of distinct CPC subclasses with patent activity each year.
Rising CPC breadth indicates a company is diversifying its innovation portfolio across more technology domains, while declining breadth signals increasing specialization.
Innovation Trajectory Archetypes
By analyzing the normalized patent output trajectories of 200 major filers, six distinct archetypes emerge. Each archetype captures a characteristic pattern of innovation growth, decline, or stability that reflects the underlying corporate strategy and market dynamics.
The table below lists all companies with their archetype classification. Use the filter to focus on a specific trajectory pattern and explore which firms share similar innovation dynamics.
Corporate Mortality
Of the companies that ranked among the top patent filers in the 1970s, how many survived to the 2020s? The rank heatmap below tracks corporate presence in the top patent rankings across five decades, revealing the remarkable volatility of innovation leadership.
Corporate Patent Ranking Over Decades
Rank heatmap showing how top patent-holding companies shifted in ranking across decades. Darker cells indicate higher rank (more patents).
The high turnover in top rankings demonstrates that sustained innovation leadership is exceptionally rare. Most firms that dominated one era were displaced by new entrants in the next.
Portfolio Diversification
How diversified are the patent portfolios of major filers? Shannon entropyShannon entropyA measure of diversity or uncertainty in a distribution. Higher entropy means a more evenly spread portfolio across technology classes; lower entropy means concentration in fewer areas. across CPC subclasses measures whether a company spreads its innovation across many technology areas or concentrates in a few domains. Higher entropy indicates a broader, more diversified portfolio.
Portfolio Diversity: Top 10 Companies
Shannon entropy across CPC subclasses over time for the 10 most diversified patent filers.
Technology conglomerates like Samsung and Hitachi maintain the highest portfolio diversity, while pharmaceutical firms tend toward focused specialization -- reflecting fundamentally different innovation strategies.
Diversification vs. Citation Impact
Shannon entropy (x) vs. median 5-year forward citations (y) for the latest period. Each dot is a company.
The scatter reveals no simple trade-off between breadth and quality: some highly diversified firms also achieve strong citation impact, suggesting that diversification and excellence are not mutually exclusive.
Technology Pivot Detection
Technology pivots occur when a company's patent portfolio shifts significantly between consecutive time windows. Using Jensen-Shannon divergenceJensen-Shannon divergenceA symmetric measure of the difference between two probability distributions. Used here to detect technology portfolio pivots by comparing a company's CPC distribution across consecutive time windows. (JSD) to measure the distance between CPC distributions across windows, we can detect and characterize these pivots -- often years before they become visible in business strategy announcements.
Patent Market Concentration
How concentrated is patent activity within each technology sector? The Herfindahl-Hirschman IndexHHIHerfindahl-Hirschman Index — a measure of market concentration calculated as the sum of squared shares. Ranges from 0 (fragmented) to 10,000 (monopoly). (HHI) measures the degree to which patenting in a CPC section is dominated by a few large filers versus spread across many organizations. Higher HHI indicates greater concentration.
Patent Concentration (HHI) by CPC Section
Herfindahl-Hirschman Index for each CPC technology section over time. Higher values indicate greater concentration of patent activity among fewer firms.
Rising concentration in sections like H (Electricity) and G (Physics) reflects the dominance of a few technology giants, while more applied fields like E (Fixed Constructions) remain fragmented across many smaller filers.
This concludes PatentWorld's exploration of 50 years of US patent innovation.
Company profiles are constructed from PatentsView data for the top 100 patent filers by total utility patent count, 1976-2025. CPC distribution uses the primary CPC classification of each patent. Trajectory archetypes are computed via time-series clustering of normalized annual patent counts. Corporate mortality tracks presence in the top 100 per decade. Shannon entropy is computed across CPC subclasses. Technology pivots use Jensen-Shannon divergence between consecutive 5-year windows of CPC distributions. Patent concentration (HHI) is computed at the CPC section level using assignee patent shares.