The Most Innovative Company of 2021

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 19, 8:41AM EST

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The Most Innovative Company of 2021 — © Sundry Photography / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

The largest companies in the world are heavily weighted by the tech industry. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Alphabet, and Amazon were all built on innovations that changed how hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people, work and spend their everyday lives. The role of innovation has not really changed over the last century and a half. Henry Ford invented the assembly line, and with it mass industrial production. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1875. It is the grandfather of the billions of smartphones people use today.

One of the primary measures of innovation is the number of patents someone is granted. For example, Thomas Edison, widely considered to be one of America’s most prolific inventors, held nearly 1,100 patents – a world record for much of the 20th century, though it has since been broken numerous times by others.

The volume of patents is also one of the primary metrics used to compare innovation between companies and countries.

Apple Inc., currently holds more than 70,000 patents globally, for instance, including nearly 2,600 that were filed last year. But the Cupertino, California-based creator of the iPhone didn’t make it onto the top 10 companies with the most patents filed in 2021. Several other major companies, including Toyota, Samsung, Huawei, and IBM all filed more patents than Apple last year. Interestingly, IBM is considered a major failure as it has worked to become one of the world;’s most important tech companies, which it was at one time.

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Not all patents are the same and many of them are for innovations that are never used. Some patents are for design – the ornamental appearance of a product, like its shape, configuration, or ornamentation. Others are for utility, meaning the way a product is used and works. Many products are covered by both types of patents if the invention’s unique quality resides in both its utility and appearance. Generally speaking, though, a utility patent is considered more valuable because the utility aspect of a product is the hardest part to invent.

To determine the company with the most patents in 2021, as well as the percentage of patents over or under the number granted in 2020, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 2022 Patent 300 report published by the patent insights resource Harrity Patent Analytics. Information on the function of the latest patent for each company came from the legal information retrieval site Justia.

The most innovative company of 2021 is troubled tech company International Business Machines Corporation. Here are the details:

> 2021 utility patents: 8,540
> Change from 2020: -9%
> Most recent patent: Mixed-reality teleconferencing across multiple locations

Click here to read The Most Innovative Companies in 2021

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.