In 2012, the Department of Commerce issued a report titled “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Industries in Focus” (hereafter, the 2012 report). The report identified the industries that rely most heavily on intellectual property (IP)—patents, trademarks, or copyrights—as IP-intensive and estimated their contribution to the U.S. economy. It generated considerable interest and energized other agencies and organizations to produce similar studies investigating the use and impact of IP across countries, industries, and companies. In 2016, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued an updated report that built on the 2012 report, titled “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: 2016 Update.”
This new report builds on the 2012 and 2016 versions by providing an update on the importance of IP-intensive industries to the U.S. economy and a fresh look at the approach used to measure those results.1 The update continues to focus on measuring the intensity of industrial IP use and the IP-intensive industries’ persistent relationship to economic indicators, such as output, employment, and wages. The data are more refined, improving precision in identifying companies within industries and including new industries in the report. While our methodology does not permit us to attribute our findings to IP alone, it provides a useful benchmark to characterize the economic importance of those industries that most intensively use IP protection and to compare the results internationally.