Many patents by foreign born
Published: Thu, Jan. 04, 2007 12:00AM
Modified Thu, Jan. 04, 2007 07:31AM
E-Mail
Print
tool name
closeNearly one-fourth of the U.S. patent applications filed in 2006 listed foreign nationals as inventors or co-inventors, according to researchers at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering and the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information.
"That's very alarming," said Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence at the Pratt School. Wadhwa helped write a new study on foreign-born entrepreneurs that also examined patent data.
The problem, as Wadhwa sees it, is that inventors who are immigrant noncitizens could move back to their home country at any time, reducing the number of valuable contributors to the nation's collective intellectual property.
More Business
He would like to see the U.S. government make it easier for skilled workers to become citizens.
Moreover, the contributions of immigrant noncitizens are growing dramatically. An estimated 7 percent of noncitizens were listed as inventors on U.S. patents in 1998, but that number expanded to 24 percent last year.
The data was culled from U.S.-based patents filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Get it all with convenient home delivery of The News & Observer.
The News & Observer is pleased to be able to offer its users the opportunity to make comments and hold conversations online. However, the interactive nature of the internet makes it impracticable for our staff to monitor each and every posting.
Since The News & Observer does not control user submitted statements, we cannot promise that readers will not occasionally find offensive or inaccurate comments posted on our website. In addition, we remind anyone interested in making an online comment that responsibility for statements posted lies with the person submitting the comment, not The News and Observer.
If you find a comment offensive, clicking on the exclamation icon will flag the comment for review by the administrators, we are counting on the good judgment of all our readers to help us.
