IBM SVP and Director of Research says the company will no longer pursue numeric patent leadership and will instead focus on open innovation and collaboration
Darío Gil / Fortune : Tweets: @rossmauri and @ibmnews Tweets: Ross Mauri / @rossmauri : As part of our relentless capacity for reinvention, @ibm decided in 2020 that we would no longer pursue the goal of numeric patent leadership. Why, after three decades, such a radical shift? One word: focus. https://fortune.com/... @ibmnews : “That's why we're betting that you should account for the real-world impact of a given technology-not just how many patents were issued while building it.” Learn more from SVP of IBM Research @dariogila about IBM's shifted focus via @FortuneMagazine: https://fortune.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
For over two decades, topping the USPTO's annual list was IBM's standing claim to R&D supremacy — 7,355 utility patents in 2015 marked its 23rd straight year at number one, even as Google and Apple climbed the rankings behind it. The 2022 numbers broke the streak: a 44% year-over-year drop to 4,743 US patents left Samsung on top at 8,513.
Darío Gil's argument in Fortune is that this wasn't erosion but policy — IBM decided in 2020, under the same refocusing logic that drove the Red Hat acquisition, to stop chasing numeric patent leadership and measure research by real-world impact instead. Framing matters here: the company is converting an embarrassing headline into evidence of discipline.
First-order effects
- Samsung now holds the top US patent spot for the first time in decades, inheriting a ranking whose prestige IBM is simultaneously working to devalue.
- IBM Research's internal scorecard shifts from filings per year to commercialized output, changing what projects compete for funding inside the lab.
Second-order effects
- Rivals still competing on patent volume — Samsung most visibly — face a benchmark that one former dominator has publicly called a vanity metric, weakening the list's signaling power for everyone else.
- IBM's open-innovation pitch leans on its hybrid-cloud and quantum ecosystem plays, where collaboration and standards capture more value than defensive filing ever did; partners evaluating IBM now weigh ecosystem access against portfolio depth.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, annual patent-count league tables fade as a proxy for innovation strength, forcing analysts and press toward harder-to-game measures like deployed products and standards influence.
- This is a case study in the strategic-institution transition: a century-old incumbent deliberately surrendering a prestige metric it defined, betting that focus beats breadth as the source of legitimacy.
The trend: Legacy tech institutions are trading prestige metrics like patent leadership for focused platform strategies, redefining how research output gets measured.