by Dennis Crouch
The chart below shows the number of inventors per patent over the past seven years. What you can see is a continued increase in the percentage of patents with teams of inventors. In particular, the percentage of patents with only one inventor continues to fall while the percentage of patents with three or more inventors continues to rise. These results follow the long trend that I discussed back in 2009: See Dennis Crouch, The Changing Nature of Inventing: Collaborative Inventing at http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2009/07/the-changing-nature-inventing-collaborative-inventing.html.
See also http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/10/the-number-of-inventors-per-patent-has-risen-fairly-steadily-for-the-past-40-years-today-most-patents-are-directed-toward-i.html; http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/05/persons-skilled-in-the-art-should-the-now-established-model-of-team-based-inventing-impact-the-obviousness-analysis.html
