IBM – a word synonymous with innovation and patent leadership, has always been a front-runner when it comes to patents issued year-on-year. For the past 24 years it has lead the way in terms of patent filings in the United States and is usually a distant first from other innovating companies.

1. IBM (PATENTING TRENDS)
Last 18 Months

2. IBM – PATENTING ACTIVITIES IN LAST 18 MONTHS
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
IBM – a word synonymous with innovation and patent leadership,
has always been a frontrunner when it comes to patents issued
year-on-year. For the past 24 years it has lead the way in terms
of patent filings in the United States and is usually a distant first
from other innovating companies.
What’s even more amazing is the fact that the patents cover
multiple technologies in diverse industrial and scientific fields.
Off late, IBM is heavily vested in the idea of artificial intelligence,
IoT, and predictive analytics. According to an announcement in
March of 2015, it said that it is looking to invest $3 Billion over
the period of four years to build a stronger secure ‘Internet of
Things’ ecosystem which companies can leverage to harness the
actual power from their connected devices.

3. IBM – PATENTING ACTIVITIES IN LAST 18 MONTHS
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Our research is focused on IBM’s patents published in the last 18
months starting January 1, 2016 till June 15, 2017. During this
period we try to identify where the patenting focus is maximum
and how it aligns with IBM’s focus on building the world’s biggest
IoT ecosystem.
As we back trace the patenting filing activities, we will look into
the sub technologies where the patents are focused and also
identify a strategic roadmap telling us that for how long IBM has
been working on boosting their IP and eventually progressing
towards this ambitious goal. We also look how the patenting
trends are observed globally giving us an insight on which
countries IBM considers worth investing heavily into.
The analysis has been done on 11894 worldwide published
patents clustered by the 8982 patent families as of June 15,
2017.

4. IBM – PATENTING ACTIVITIES IN LAST 18 MONTHS
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INTRODUCTION
As we mentioned earlier, IBM has been the patent leader for the
past 24 years with a distant lead from the second highest
granted patent company. 2016 patenting activity also meant
that IBM breached the 8000 patents granted in a year by having
8088 patents granted. This has happened for the first ever time
and clearly no one else has ever done that.
A graph below shows how IBM’s patenting statistics pan out
over the period of 24 years (Only U.S. Patents).
* Data taken from USPTO

5. IBM – PATENTING ACTIVITIES IN LAST 18 MONTHS
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YEAR 2016
A total of 8088 patents have been filed in the year 2016 alone
by IBM and in the process, it became the first ever company to
breach the 8000 patents won in a year mark. As we drill down
further into these 8088 patents plus 900 odd patents and
counting this year, we have a look at how other innovative
companies stand against it, in a graph below.

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From the graph above, it can be seen that Samsung is a distant
second followed by some of the most innovating companies in
Canon, Qualcomm, Intel, Google, Microsoft etc.
On breaking further these 8088 patents from IBM, Almost 34%
of the patents filed are in the field of Artificial Intelligence,
Cognitive computing and Predictive analytics which clearly
reflects a shift of focus towards ‘Internet of Things’, the
analytics behind it and also boosting the cloud technologies to
achieve a robust ecosystem.
The similar trend of patented technology is achieved elsewhere
globally as well indicating that IBM plans to expand this
technology to other countries as well and help companies truly
harness the potential of connecting things.
Our research led us to some interesting insights into the
patenting activities of IBM in last 18 months. For any other
company, 18 months is a very short time frame to identify

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important insights but for IBM, being such an innovation leader,
it paints a very amazing picture.
PATENT FILING TREND
We look retrospectively on the filing trend of the patents that
have been granted in the last 18 months.
The patents extracted for our study indicates that the patent
filing starts as long as 13 years before getting it granted. As
indicated earlier, these patents are mostly related to several

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industry domains. Only since 2010, it has been observed that
the patents related to Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive
Computing and Cloud Computing have experienced a surge.
PATENT GLOBAL COVERAGE
As can be seen from the above graph, USA leads as the top
patent filing country followed by China, Japan, UK, Germany and
Taiwan. These are potential markets for artificial intelligence and

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cognitive computing and IBM realizes that and hence their patent
distribution shows a consolidated amount protected in these
countries.
TOP TECHNOLOGIES
PATENTED
Our analysis resulted in nearly 35% patents worldwide filed in
the field of Artificial Intelligence and Predictive analytics. That’s
more than one third of overall technologies protected. Before
we delve into the technologies, we wanted to understand why
IBM is aggressively committed to these technologies. The
answer lies in the fact that IBM has a he clientele utilizing their
cloud based solutions. If IBM starts working on a robust Internet
of Things unit, it would help their clients to go all out in terms of
harnessing the true potential of the connecting devices.

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Predictive analytics is also the need of the hour and having an
infrastructure to cater such analytics, it will give IBM a massive
advantage over the likes of Cisco, GE, and Verizon, who are also
going all out on IoT advancement. IBM has provided a broad set
of solutions, ranging from water management to optimizing
retail and customer loyalty to alleviating traffic congestion. IBM
also has a huge advantage in terms of harnessing enterprise IoT
implementations which securely combine and analyze data from
a wide variety of sources. During their March, 2015
announcement of betting big on IoT ecosystem, IBM also
mentioned utilizing their cloud data services and developer tools,
and building on that expertise to help clients and partners
integrate data from an unprecedented number of IoT and
traditional sources. These resources will be made available on an
open platform to provide manufacturers with the ability to
design and produce a new generation of connected devices that
are better optimized for the IoT. Predictive analytics can then be

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utilized by business leaders across industries to create systems
for better decision-making.
Below are the key technologies that IBM has patented –
* Only dominant technologies have been shown here which comprises nearly 47% of the patents in the period
As evident, the patenting shift in the last 18 months indicate
how IBM intends to align their patent protection with IoT
Ecosystem built up. There will be no surprises if IBM also leads
the way to the top again in 2017. We will keep an eye out for
this when the results come up in January 2018.

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ABOUT US
Citius Minds is a leading technology consulting firm supporting
clients in advanced patent analytics and end to end patent
litigation services. Together, Citius Minds’ founding consulting
experts have more than three decades of experience supporting
the world’s leading companies and law firms in their IP
management needs.
Enquiries:
info@citiusminds.com
Jay Sharma
+1 312-957-7066