Americans Lose Ground in Patent Race

Foreigners accounted for almost half of the patents granted by the U.S. government last year, with the largest number going to the Japanese, the head of the U.S. Patent Office said Saturday.

Patent Commissioner Donald J. Quigg said the heavy demand by foreigners for patents was a disturbing trend and showed that the United States is losing ground in the development of new technology in this the bicentennial year of the Constitution, the document that established the patent system.

“For too many years, we have done far too little to ensure that by our next centennial one of our most precious national treasures, the American inventor, will still be a surviving species,” Quigg said in a report to the American Bar Assn.’s patent and trademark section.

U.S. residents were granted 38,124 patents last year, 54% of the total, while foreigners from 100 countries accounted for nearly 33,000 of the patents granted, the report said.

Japanese Get 2 Out of 5

The Japanese were awarded two of every five foreign patents for a total of 13,857 in 1986, by far the largest number of any foreign nation.

Quigg said that 20 years ago American inventors obtained 50 times the number of patents that Japanese inventors obtained. That ratio had shrunk to less than 3-to-1 last year.

“The reality of nearly 33,000 U.S. patents being granted to (foreigners) with an eye on our markets must give us pause,” Quigg said in his remarks, which were released in Washington.

To counter this trend, he said more attention should be focused on education.

Quigg said the Patent Office has launched Project XL, a cooperative program with educators aimed at fostering analytical thinking in classrooms.

“Our nation’s schools are filled with potential Edisons and Marconis,” he said, but “the education that America’s schoolchildren receive has not measured up compared to that of the children in other countries. We are particularly weak in science and in math.”