IPR leading telecom players

The November issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine features a top-ten ranking of the leading patent-generating companies in several industries. The survey work, conducted by 1790 Analytics for the magazine, used several parameters to work out a score for each company in terms of its patent power:

• the number of patents it issued in 2005
  
• the ratio with the number of patents issued in 2004
  
• how often 2005 patents (from the company and others) cites the company's patents from 2000 to 2004
• how general the patent is (is it cited in other fields?)
  
• and patent originality: how many different technologies does the patent builds on.

All the parameters are multiplied to give a total score. In telecom the top five patent power players were:

1. Finisar (issued 113 patents in '05) had a score of 1103
2. Cisco Systems (453) 909
3. Silicon Light Machines (26) 700
4. Motorola (522) 600
5. Nortel Networks (382) 450
   

Micron Technology (total score 3396), IBM (3084) and HP (2756) were the top three patent companies overall. As for universities, MIT was top with a score of 840.