

How Smart Is Your State? US States Ranked by Patents per Million People - graemeklass
http://www.sharcmedia.com/ip/how-smart-is-your-state-us-states-ranked-by-patents-per-million-people/

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wastedbrains
If you don't really agree with software patents this measure doesn't work
well...

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gojomo
I doubt software patents contribute much to the totals, or would change the
rankings if left out. Same for business method patents.

And you might disagree with patents entirely but still see them as correlated
with a certain type of intelligent opportunism.

Pretty sure Idaho owes its ranking to a few key corporate research groups in
patent-heavy fields -- HP, Micron, ?

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edw519
I think "cashiers who can make change without a cash register" would be a
better measure.

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graywh
A lot of things would be a better measure.

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graemeklass
For those that want to experiment with the KML file you can download it at
<http://www.sharcmedia.com/kml/PatentsPerMillion2.kml>

Regarding a finer grained heat map it would be cool, but I couldn't find any
finer grained data (eg. by US Postcode) on the USPTO site.

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scw
It'd be much better if they de-aggregated this information over the surface to
create a true 'heat map'. If they did this, you'd probably see true hotspots
of patent innovation which I'll bet correspond nicely to startup hubs.

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pg
This would be a lot better if the colors varied continuously.

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graywh
Yes, the graphic could use some help from <http://www.colorbrewer.org/>.

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chaostheory
nice, a patent troll ranking for the US

