Patents per Capita

Question

I am looking for patents issued per capita for the Census Metropolitan Areas of Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Any suggestions?

Preferably recent (2001+) data.

Answers

1. I checked with one of my colleagues who does a fair bit of patent searching and he replied: I couldn't get much from the Canadian patent database on inventor locations - inventor address didn't seem to be part of the publicly available record. US patents
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html do have address info (probably since 1976). I tried locally and had to include the country code with the search: ic/waterloo AND icn/ca

A fancier search would list other cities (would I count St Jacobs or Breslau as part of Waterloo?). For date ranging you'd have to decide on whether you were limiting by patent date or application date (major difference in the US, not so in Canada). This picked up what inventions had inventors in this city.

2. Statistics Canada does not have any information on the overall number of patents, either at the national level or by CMA. However, the Canadian Patent Database is a public database at Industry Canada, from which you may be able to extract this information. See http://cipo.gc.ca.

We do have information on the number of Canadian patents issued to Canadian universities and research hospitals for 2003 but due to confidentiality, it is only available by province/region, not by CMA. See p. 30 of the document below.
www.statcan.ca/english/research/88F0006XIE/88F0006XIE2005018.pdf

Information on the number of US patents issued to the larger Canadian universities is available by institution from the AUTM survey. See http://www.autm.net.