Which San Diego firms are the most inventive? When the 2008 year-end patent figures recently became available, we decided to find out. Xconomy is listing the top 25 patent winners in the San Diego region below, based on data provided by IFI Patent Intelligence of Wilmington, DE. Our compilation includes a few surprises.
San Diego-based Qualcomm might reasonably be expected to lead the region in patents issued in 2008—and with its longtime leadership in wireless technology, indeed that was the case. Yet the company that garnered the second-highest number of patents last year is not a major engineering research and development conglomerate like SAIC, but Callaway Golf, the Carlsbad-based maker of high-end golf clubs.
Some also might find it surprising to see a startup company in the top 10, since prosecuting patents is neither cheap nor routine—and startups are typically founded on a sole technology. Yet San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies ranks No. 8 on our list, with 21 patents issued in 2008, which was a decline from 31 patents awarded to Fallbrook in 2007. The venture-backed startup has more than 300 patents issued or pending for its revolutionary transmission design.
In preparing the data, IFI analyzed 2008 utility patents assigned to companies by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IBM continued to top the national list in 2008, with 4,186 patents issued, and U.S. companies accounted for 49 percent of all
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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