There are so many patent applications filed from Raleigh that the city placed city 15th on Forbes magazine’s list of the “World’s Most Inventive Cities.”
The Raleigh area boasted 3.74 patent applications for every 10,000 residents. The top city for patent applications was Eindoven in the southern region of the Netherlands. With just 693,033 residents, Eindoven was the third smallest of the cities making the Forbes magazine list. But it ranked as the most inventive with 22.58 patent applications per 10,000 residents.
IBM (NYSE:IBM) has consistently ranked as the top U.S. company in terms of patent filings and patent awards. While Big Blue’s Research Triangle Park campus does handle some R&D work leading to these patent filings, the company’s patent activity comes from a number of global locations including its Armonk, N.Y. headquarters.
The top U.S. city, and second overall in the Forbes ranking, was San Diego. The California city boasts 8.95 patent applications per 10,000 residents. The United States placed six cities on the list of 15 cities. Besides Raleigh and San Diego, the other U.S. cities making the Forbes list were San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis and Seattle.
