By Michael Arndt

Measuring Invention

What's the most inventive company on the planet? If you judge by sheer volume, it's IBM (IBM), which has received more patents from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office than any other company for 17 years in a row. No. 2 would be Samsung (SSNKF:US), which has trailed IBM since 2006. But the rankings look different if you measure patents by their value, as Ocean Tomo did at the request of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The intellectual-property consulting firm sorted through U.S. patents granted to the world's 1,000 biggest companies (by revenue) from 2005 to 2009. Ocean Tomo then assessed the patents' value by tallying, among other things, patent filing trends, litigation rates, and how many times each was cited by other applicants or in scientific and technical journals. The data were aggregated into a patent value index number and ranking. Appraised this way, Samsung retains its status, but IBM slides to No. 8. As for Ocean Tomo's winner, read on to find out. A hint: It's often the butt of a rival's jokey ads.