Innovation in Cincinnati
Elizabeth Edwards
As a venture capital investor at
Neyer Holdings, I strive to quantify just about everything, so when invited to write a blog on my favorite topic, innovation in Cincinnati, I thought I'd apply some Carmen Sandiego sleuthing to the subject and find out how we stack up against other cities in the U.S. in terms of innovation.
The
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website is a plethora of information about how to file a patent, trademark, or copyright. The USPTO also has an online database where you can search patents and trademarks. So, in my quest to quantify innovation, I started there. Admittedly, not all innovations are patentable (to be patented they must be novel and useful in some way), but patents are a good apples-to-apples indicator of innovation in a region.
So, I picked five Midwest cities - Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, and Pittsburgh – and five cities from different parts of the US - Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Seattle and San Francisco – and ran some numbers. It's important to note that in this analysis I only included the city proper (as opposed to the surrounding metro area), excluding places like Palo Alto from San Francisco and West Chester from Cincinnati.
How we stack up: We're #1.
You might be interested to know that over 16,037 patents have been issued to Cincinnati inventors since 1976. In today's numbers, that's over 48 patents per thousand population. Out of the ten cities I searched Cincinnati had the highest number of issued patents per capita. We are truly an innovative city.
Innovative cities todayWhenever I speak on innovation and entrepreneurship, I often cite San Francisco as my shining-city-on-a-hill of an example. How did I go wrong? I was sure San Francisco was more innovative. Well, in San Francisco, where the population of the city proper is about twice the size of our city, the number of issued patents per thousand is only 26 per thousand compared to our 48 – but they are quickly catching up. Though Cincinnati has far more issued patents per thousand population, San Francisco's rate of new innovation (or the number of new patent applications in the last 7 years) is pretty extreme, with 28 patent applications per thousand population compared to our 21.
Our challenge now? In order to create long term economic growth, new companies, investment, and jobs, we have to keep up with the cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin who are tearing it up in terms of new innovation. The only way to stay innovative is to invent, invent, invent.
It should come as no surprise that our region is a Mecca for consumer product, surgical, and aircraft technology. In fact, P&G makes up over 15% of our patent applications and together, P&G, GE, and Ethicon make up about 25% of our city's recent applications. While at 25% our proportion of corporate innovation is slightly higher than some of our metro peers, Seattle has a similar experience with its intellectual property giant, Microsoft. 34% of Seattle's recent applications were Microsoft applications. But in Cincinnati, who makes up the other 75% of new applications? People just like you.