1 This corresponds to the USPTO criteria for a utility patent of new, non-obvious, and useful.

2 Population data come from U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau 2021.

3 This adjustment is discussed in greater detail in the Technical Appendix and the methodology report prepared by Science-Metrix.

4 Name matching (disambiguation) for this analysis is based on a 6.2 million name database for 182 countries, created using country-level sets of name dictionaries (Martinez, Raffo, and Saito 2016).

5 OSS licenses allow developers to share their software with the public so that others can use, modify, and extend the original computer software programs. Proprietary software, by contrast, is generally not accessible for modification and is not available for use free of charge.

6 The biological and biomedical sciences contributions to patenting take place both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

7 As a membership-based organization, its coverage is less than complete; the values reported can be considered a lower boundary.

8 Within these agreements, protected CRADA information means generated information that would have been proprietary had it been obtained from a nonfederal entity instead of from the U.S. federal government.

9 Both the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Department of Defense (DOD) support startups. However, neither department reported startup support to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) during 2012–2016.

10 Businesses with one to nine employees are now surveyed on innovation activities with the Annual Business Survey-1 (ABS) questionnaire. Businesses with 10 or more employees are surveyed with the ABS-2, which focuses on innovation, technology, intellectual property, and business owner characteristics but not on research and development.

11 Trademarks are assigned to geographic locations based on the county of residence of the trademark holders. To avoid double counting, this report uses fractional counts for trademarks shared by holders in multiple locations; a county receives partial credit for a trademark based on the number of trademark holders who reside in that county divided by all the holders of that trademark. Less than 3% of trademarks are assigned to more than one county.