Asian innovation takes hold in the US
The Thomson Reuters 2008 Global Innovation Study revealed that Asian innovation is taking hold in the US.
The Thomson Reuters 2008 Global Innovation Study analyzed the leading innovators by key region. The study tracked the top ten innovators in China, Europe, Japan, Korea and the U.S. on the basis of total number of unique inventions issued in granted patents and published patent applications. It found that 70 percent of the top ten innovators in the U.S. were non-U.S. companies. In contrast, home region innovators dominate the Asian and European top ten lists.
Innovation in the US
Among the top innovators in the U.S. were—in order—Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Korea); International Business Machines Corp. (U.S.); Microsoft (U.S.); Toshiba (Japan); Canon (Japan); Fujitsu Ltd. (Japan); Sony Corp. (Japan); General Electric Co. (U.S.); Seiko Epson Corp. (Japan); and Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co. Ltd. (Taiwan).
Among the Asian firms who have developed a large innovation footprint in the U.S., Samsung, Toshiba, Canon, Sony Corp. and Seiko Epson also rank among the top ten innovators in their home regions. The American companies among the U.S. top ten do not rank in the top ten of any other regions in this study.
Europe
In Europe, just one of the top ten innovators was from outside Europe: Samsung Electronics Co. LTD (Korea), which was the third most innovative company there last year. The remaining nine of the top ten are all European businesses. No European companies were in the top ten in the U.S. or Asia.
Asia
All the Asian regions studied show that Asian companies see the importance of their native markets in terms of innovation reinvestment. The top ten innovators in Japan, China and Korea are Japanese, Chinese and Korean organizations, respectively.
See charts showing the breakout of the top ten innovators in each region, using data compiled using Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI).
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