information:highlighting
Innovation decline

The number of patent applications filed each year has been growing for most countries although not smoothly, and jumps in activity are often observed due to changes in local laws. The high number of patent families for Spain in the 1800s is related to the superior preservation and cataloguing of the data by Spanish Patent and Trademark Office compared to other countries (see 1836 U.S. Patent Office fire). The US was the World's leader in terms of patent families filed between 1900 and 1966, when Japan took over. Since 2007 PR China leads.

However, in most technologically advanced countries (see, for example, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, the UK in the figure on the right, as well as in Poland), the total (i.e. regardless of the priority/inventors' country) number of patent families filed there have been declining in absolute numbers since c. 1970s –1980s. The decline is even more pronounced when the number of patent applications is normalized by the country's population each year, or when the country of origin rather than country of filing is used. For the US, the population-normalized peak in patenting occurred in 1915, and the number of subsequent patents induced per patent has been mostly declining since 1926. A study of 4,512 patents obtained by Stanford University between 1970 and 2020 showed that the university's patenting activity plateaued in the 2010s. Incidentally, only 20% of Stanford patents in that dataset produced a positive net income for the university, while the rest was a net loss.

Similar declines have been noted not only for the number of patents, but also for other measures of innovation output.

Several hypotheses have been proposed as explanations for the observed decline: