A commercial real-estate firm called CommercialCafe crunched data on patents from 1975 through 2015 and did some state-by-state comparisons – probably because it knows media outlets (who, me?) can’t resist such lists.
You will not be surprised to hear that the New Hampshire individual with the most patents is Dean Kamen. I encounter his name almost every week while passing on the list of New Hampshire-related patents for this blog, associated with engineers at DEKA, the R&D firm that he founded in 1982 and which has become a linchpin of southern New Hampshire’s economy. It’s hard for outsiders to know how much of each patent is actually his or whether he has become the equivalent of an academic research lab’s “principal investigator,” the senior academic who brings in grant money and gets his (almost always a male) name put on anything the lab does.
In terms of New Hampshire companies, DEKA is outdone by BAE Systems for total patents, but I can’t give you numbers because it’s too difficult to filter out the other parts of BAE’s global empire in the Patent Office database. Hypertherm in Hanover, Allegro Microsystems in Manchester and Bauer Hockey in Exeter also show up frequently on our weekly patent list.
Academically, Dartmouth is by far the patent leader for the state (no surprise there).
What is a surprise, however, is that Kamen is not the most prolific patent-getting in Northern New England, by a long shot. Edward J. Nowak, a physicist living in Shelburne, Vt., who is ” Chief Designer at Quantum Queries/Quantum Jump” has 631 patents with his name attached, compared to 361 for Kamen.
A comparison of industrial areas that received patents shows how New Hampshire has completely shed its industrial history: The most patents were for Electricity, and the least were in Textiles.
For the state-by-state comparison with our neighbors, here goes:
STATE – TOTAL PATENTS
N.H. – 12,325
Mass. – 148,944
Vt. – 2,582
Me. – 2,773
If you want to check out other states, click here.
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