Technology and the Economy: What is Actually Happening?

Humans are excellent storytellers, and we’re inundated with stories about technology, companies, and stocks. Sometimes these stories paint an unbiased picture, but often they distort the facts. Instead, let’s look at the data and see what stories it tells.

Methodology: 

  1. Collect all the US patents issued since 2022. 
  2. Count the number of patents issued each day in each of the unique CPC subclasses. 
  3. Sort the subclasses by their sizes and growth rates to observe where the most technology innovation is happening, and where there is recent growth. 
  4. Count the owners (“assignees”) of the patents within these fast growing domains.

Some stats:

3,000,000+ patents (2022 - present)
255,374 unique CPC subclasses

Here we see the fastest growing areas of innovation, with the largest volumes of new patents, and recent acceleration where new activity in the last 30 days stands out.

H10D30/01 Manufacture or treatment

Some classifications have experienced rapid growth of new patent issuance over the last 4 years. Some highlights include: Field-effect transistors [FET]

H10K59/80 Constructional details

H10D30/67 Thin-film transistors [TFT]

H10D84/01 Manufacture or treatment

H10D62/10 Shapes, relative sizes or dispositions of the regions of the semiconductor bodies; Shapes of the semiconductor bodies

H10D84/03 using Group IV technology, e.g. silicon technology or silicon-carbide [SiC] technology

A01H6/54 Leguminosae or Fabaceae, e.g. soybean, alfalfa or peanut

A61K40/42 Cancer antigens

H04L41/16 using machine learning or artificial intelligence

Disclaimers: US Patent data back to 2017. Data is not guaranteed to be 100% complete. In this document we make casual use of the terms “CPC Classifications”, “classifications”, “classes”, “domains”, “markets”, etc. and shortened or modified classification names in order to make the ideas clearer. Please ask if you would like clarification about what we mean. Because we are counting the patents within each classification, patents with multiple classifications will show up in the charts for each of those classifications. In other words, readers should not treat the counts as additive when evaluating higher level classifications; counts must be recalculated at the parent class in order to avoid double counting.