Question:
I have a student who is looking to find out what the patent density of Canadian cities is. Basically, he wants to know how many patents are issued within a city for the time period 2006 – 2016 (if possible).
Answer:
Apparently, the European Patent Office collects international patent data and they have a database that was used by the University of Aalborg in Denmark to create patent data visualization.
The tricky thing about analyzing Canadian patent data is that a substantial number of Canadian inventors file first in the U.S. For example, in 2017, Canadian inventors filed 4,053 patent applications in Canada and 19,861 abroad, mostly in the U.S. So any analysis should probably include both US and CA patent applications filed by CA inventors.
For Canadian city-level raw data, the best source is probably the European Patent Office’s PATSTAT database. PATSTAT contains bibliographical data relating to more than 100 million patent documents from leading industrialised and developing countries. It also includes the legal status data from more than 40 patent authorities contained in the EPO worldwide legal status database (INPADOC). It is used by many organizations and academics for patent analysis. Knowledge of SQL is required in order to retrieve data. Training materials are provided. PATSTAT is not free but it does offer a free one-month trial.
Using PATSTAT data, a team at the University of Aalborg in Denmark has created Global Patent Explorer, a patent data analysis and visualization tool that allows you to drill-down to the city level for numerous countries including Canada.
The CIPO publishes province-level data in its annual reports. See 2017-18, for example.
The WIPO’s IP country profile database is useful but does not have province- or city-level data.
The USPTO publishes a number of statistical reports including geographic origin (country, state and US metropolitan area). See https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/reports.htm . Unfortunately, these reports tend to be several years behind and only US metropolitan areas are available.
This may also be of use: http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cipointernet-internetopic.nsf/eng/h_wr01933.html
