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Trends in nanotechnology patents

Nature Nanotechnology volume 3, pages 123–125 (2008)Cite this article

An analysis of 30 years of data on patent publications from the US Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office and the Japan Patent Office confirms the dominance of companies and selected academic institutions from the US, Europe and Japan in the commercialization of nanotechnology.

The papers that reported the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope in 1981 and the atomic force microscope in 1986 have been credited in part with 'opening the doors to the nanoworld'1, and the fact that these papers have been cited thousands of times by other researchers is a testament to the impact that these two instruments have had in the field of nanoscale science and technology. There were also significant advances in other areas such as molecular self-assembly and nanomechanics around the same time, and these fragmented areas were brought together by the increased availability of techniques to control and restructure matter at the nanoscale at the end of 1990s2. Today, more than 60 countries have national programmes in nanotechnology3 and hundreds of nanotechnology-based products are commercially available4. In addition to scientific papers and commercial products, however, there is another way to gauge the rate of progress in nanotechnology over the past few decades — patents.

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Figure 1: Number of nanotechnology patents published by the USPTO, EPO and JPO according to publication date.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the US National Science Foundation (IIS-0311652, CMMI-0533749 and CMMI-0654232). M.C.R. was partially supported by the Directorate for Engineering, NSF. The authors thank the USPTO, EPO and JPO for making their databases available for research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence Lab, Eller College of Management, University of Arizona, Tucson, 85721, Arizona, USA

    Hsinchun Chen, Xin Li & Yiling Lin

  2. National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, 22230, Virginia, USA

    Mihail C. Roco

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  1. Hsinchun Chen
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  2. Mihail C. Roco
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  3. Xin Li
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  4. Yiling Lin
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Chen, H., Roco, M., Li, X. et al. Trends in nanotechnology patents. Nature Nanotech 3, 123–125 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.51

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