For 29 years straight, IBM has led the United States in minting patents, at its peak filing over 10,000 US patent applications in a single year for innovations ranging from the ATM to e-commerce, two-nanometer chips, and quantum computing. It’s been an amazing run–but the new IBM is ready for new challenges.
As part of our relentless capacity for reinvention, we decided in 2020 that we would no longer pursue the goal of numeric patent leadership. As a result, 2022 is the first time since 1993 that IBM didn’t claim the top spot on the list of companies with the most U.S. patents.
