Hello FedInvent Readers.
We're back. Today, we'll share our latest insight on the taxpayer-funded patents funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and our work to improve the quality of the data about taxpayer-funded inventions. FedInvent is building a comprehensive suite of tools for science and technology policymakers, inventors, innovation researchers, and taxpayers whose money funds over $200 billion in research and development each year. It starts with the contract numbers.
Today's newsletter is divided into four sections. We start with a Bottom Line Up Front high level view into our discoveries about DOE patents. Then, we spend a few paragraphs sharing our observations on the current Bayh-Dole renaissance. Who knew a bill from 1980 could suddenly be popular and contentious again? Next, we share the core questions our contract whispering and data wrangling effort seeks to answer. Then comes the good stuff: an overview of the DOE invention landscape at DOE from 2005 to 2023.
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From 2005 to 2023, the Department of Energy funded R&D that led to 20,762 patents. Here is how these patents break down by DOE entity.
Taxpayer-funded R&D and the patents it creates are suddenly a hot topic. There is lots of hand-wringing on the pending demise of the US innovation enterprise as we know it. (Not likely.) The NIST Draft Interagency Guidance Framework for Considering the Exercise of March-In Rights gives the heebie-jeebies to scientists and investigators who rely on federal money to advance their research. They have time. (It'll take years for the march-in lawsuits to work through the courts.)
Congress is joining in the fun. The draft FAUCI Act —Fixing Administrations Unethical Corrupt Influence Act, seeking to prevent top federal health officials from cashing in on the industries they regulated after leaving public service, is floating around the Hill. (It's going nowhere, but you have to love a bill with a good acronym.) Efforts are afoot to write new rules for where the products protected by taxpayer-funded patents can be manufactured. (Easier said than done. At least right now.)
And the think tanks thinking about IP think that instead of marching in and forcing compulsory licensing, more work should be put into making the market for taxpayer-funded more competitive. (We agree.)
FedInvent has its own set of Bayh-Dole grievances. FedInvent is focusing on the poor quality data about the patents and patent applications covered by the Act. We believe the lack of comprehensive data on taxpayer-funded inventions is a problem. Comprehensive analysis of the outcomes of spending billions of dollars on R&D is daunting. FedInvent is working to create solid data that will enable a better understanding of the trajectory of federal money and how it gets products into the marketplace. To do this, we embarked on a contract-whispering and data-wrangling mission.
The biggest challenge of mapping who got the grant to who got the patent is the contract number. So we are fixing the contract numbers because:
The contract numbers are a mess. The most innovative people in America need help with the letter O and the number zero, and so does the software used to draft patent applications. Even the list of contract numbers USPTO extracted from its government interest statement data is a mess.
Without good contract and grant numbers, it's almost impossible to determine whether the grant recipient was also the patent recipient.
Without the grant-recipient-to-patent-assignee nexus, it’s hard to follow the dispersion of taxpayer R&D money.
Once you have the relationships mapped out, you can do a better job of firing out which agencies, not just federal executive branch departments, you can figure out which agencies get the best return on investment of taxpayer money.
What is the taxpayer's return on investment? Without knowing how the money relates to the intellectual property, it's hard to determine where the most consequential inventions come from and which programs work best. For example, the ARPAs — DARPA, ARPA-E, IARPA, and the newest ARPA-H — all get a lot of money to advance high-potential, high-risk R&D. What's the ROI on that investment vs. a Phase II SBIR grant to a company commercializing their innovative IP? FedInvent wants to make it easier to answer these types of questions.
Finally, federal reporting on patents and patent applications is siloed. Most reporting relies on department-specific reporting systems to provide Congress, federal policymakers, and innovation professionals with information on the impact of federal R&D spending. Policymakers, researchers, and taxpayers need a complete and integrated view of all of the inventions regardless of what federal department funded the work.
If you want a more competitive intellectual property market, you need a comprehensive view of ALL taxpayer-funded innovations.
We're fixing the contract numbers. FedInvent confirms that the contract numbers are real and valid, not alphanumeric mumbo jumbo thrown into the government interest section of a patent. We get the name of the contract and grant recipients to see if the entity that got the grant is the entity that got the patent. These two elements give our users a deeper understanding of where the inventions are coming from and who owns them.
The FedInvent database has almost 123,000 taxpayer-funded patents granted between 2005 and 2024 and growing. So far, we've finished the National Science Foundation portfolio, patents funded by the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program managed by the Army Medical R&D Command, DARPA patents, patents funded by the Intelligence Community, patents that were funded by Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contracts and most recently the entire portfolio of patents funded by the Department of Energy. Here's an overview of what we learned about DOE.
ALL PATENTS
From 2005 to 2023, DOE funded 20,762. These patents cite 3,132 unique contract/grant numbers. Thirty-six (36) of the 3,132 unique contract/grant numbers are national lab management and operations (M&O) contract numbers. The DOE patents contained 22,604 individual DOE funding citations.
Eighty-nine percent (89%) of the patents cite DOE as the only source of funding for the inventors. The other 11% of the DOE patents have two or more contract or grant numbers from other federal departments. Thirty-nine percent (39%) of these patents show a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant number. Twenty-eight percent (28%) cite a Department of Defense (DOD) contract or grant number. Twenty-five percent (25%) show the Department of Health and Human Services and National Institutes of Health contract numbers. The rest of the patents with more than one department funding source cite USDA, NASA, and the Department of Commerce (NIST), respectively.
DOE NATIONAL LABS PATENTS
Please note that patents may show funding from more than one national lab.
The DOE National Laboratories funded about 62% of the DOE patents. These 12,827 patents cite either a DOE contract in the government interest statement, a patent where the assignee is a national lab, or where patents assigned to DOE can be tracked to one of the national labs.
The next series of charts shows how DOE-funded patents were granted over time.
Office of Science National Labs 2005 to 2023
National Nuclear Security Administration Labs 2005-2023
Patents Funded By Other Offices 2025-2023
ARPA-E is Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy
EERE is the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
FECM is the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management
NNSA is the National Nuclear Energy Security Administration
ARPA-E Rising
The most impressive line on this chart is ARPA-E's trajectory. Founded in 2009, ARPA-E almost caught up with the Office of Science in terms of the number of patents its funding supported. In 2023, ARPA-E was cited as the funding source on 148 DOE patents, while the Office of Sciences, exclusive of the Office of Science National Laboratories, received 162.
Our DOE contract whispering and data wrangling revealed other interesting information about the patents DOE funded. Here is what we found.
Seven hundred ten (710) patents received funding from one of DOE's high-performance computing or exascale computing programs managed by DOE's NNSA labs. IBM received 457 patents funded by these programs, Advanced Micro Devices received 155, and Nvidia received 41.
(For investors unhappy about missing out on buying Nvidia before the price skyrocketed, if you watched Nvidia's 2014-2018 patents funded by both the DOE high-performance computing program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and DARPA's PERFECT program and bought the stock then you would have made a fortune. The stock price in June of 2019 was $36.00. Today, May 29, 2024, it's $1,140.59.)
The official name of the Bayh-Dole Act is the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act of 1980. FedInvent found only 529 patents where at least one of the contract numbers on the patent was a DOE-funded Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant, about 2% of the total patents funded by DOE. By comparison, the National Science Foundation funded 20,259 patents from 2005 to 2023. Of those patents, 1,326 (6.5%) cite SBIRs or STTRs as the type of contract that funded the work. We suspect there is higher participation by small businesses in DOE R&D efforts that lead to inventions and patents but there is no easy way to definitively identify the patents funded by SBIR/STTR grants.
DOE funded 7,442 patents where one or more of the assignees is a higher education entity — college, university, university-affiliated medical center, or research organization identified by NSF as a higher education entity.
There are 225 patents with unfindable contract number mumbo-jumbo that prevent definitively linking a patent to a DOE funding entity. We cut this list down considerably by digging through the Certificates of Correction at USPTO.
These unknown patents also include patents where the inventor's government interest statement cites funding from DOE but the inventor didn't provide any contract information.
There are also several that contain DOD MIPR numbers — Military Interdepartmental Purchase Requests. These are essentially interagency funding agreements that transfer money from the DOD to another agency to perform work on the DOD's behalf.
Several patents with NSA contract numbers have inventors citing DOE as the funding department. These are all high-performance computing inventions.
Thanks for being patient while we went dark to do a deep dive on the inventions funded by the Department of Energy.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll publish more analysis on what we’re finding as we contract whisper and data wrangle our way to better data about taxpayer-funded patents and the federal innovation ecosphere.
The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere and taxpayer-funded inventions. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.
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