Utility Patents per 100,000 Residents · Iowa

## What this measures

Utility patents granted in a year whose first-named inventor lived in Iowa, per 100,000 people living in the state. Annual, from 2000.

## Why it matters

Dividing by population puts small and large states on one scale, so this is the usual way to compare how inventive state economies are. The leading states, with technology clusters and research universities, run at several times the national rate; the gap is one of the starkest in any state economic measure.

## How to read it

Patents per 100,000 residents per year. Compare with other states in the same year, and with Iowa's own trend. For the fifty states and DC together the figure was about 44 in 2015 and 39 in 2025.

## What it does not say

A patent is credited to one state only, the home of the inventor named first, so team patents with co-inventors elsewhere count once, where the first inventor lived. Where the company that owns it is based does not matter: a California firm's patent invented by an engineer in Texas counts for Texas. It counts patents granted, not applications, so it trails research by the two to three years examination takes, and it moves with the Patent Office's own backlog. Patents differ enormously in value; a count treats them all alike. Locations come from PatentsView's disambiguation of the addresses printed on the patent and are occasionally wrong. The denominator is all residents, not workers or scientists, so states with many retirees or children read lower. The series starts in 2000 because Palanor's population inputs do; the count itself goes back to 1976.

## Source

PatentsView granted-patent tables (g_patent, g_inventor_disambiguated, g_location_disambiguated), published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on its Open Data Portal (data.uspto.gov, product PVGPATDIS, quarterly). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; attribution: PatentsView (www.patentsview.org). Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov. Palanor counts utility patents granted in each calendar year (withdrawn patents left out) by the state of the first-named inventor's disambiguated location. These counts reproduce USPTO's own Patent Technology Monitoring Team table "Patent Counts by Country, State, and Year – Utility Patents" (which ended in 2015) within 0.5% in every year checked. Read by hand once a year. The rate is a Palanor calculation: patents ÷ resident population × 100,000, with both inputs kept on each point. Residents are the Census Bureau's July 1 resident population estimates for the year (Population Estimates Program: 2000–2009 intercensal, 2010–2019 Vintage 2020, 2020 on the newest vintage; a year the newest vintage does not reach yet uses its last year). A work of the U.S. Government (17 U.S.C. §105), public domain.