May 18—ROCHESTER — President Abraham Lincoln described patents as adding “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” If that’s accurate, then local inventors have long been heating up Rochester with their patents.

The city is home to many creative thinkers like Adam “Griff” Griffin, who knew he wanted to be an inventor at age 17. He has 40 patents under the IBM banner. Dr. Richard Ehman at Mayo Clinic is another prolific inventor with more than 40 U.S. patents of his own, including a new type of imaging called magnetic resonance elastography.

Unsurprisingly, health care and computing dominate Rochester’s patents. However, many other types of inventions also originate from here. Innovations in hookah technology, luggage, paver stones, healthy horse feed, musical education devices, action figures, printing apparatus and much more have all been conceived and patented in Rochester.

Rochester inventors have been issued more than 26,500 patents since 2000. From 2000 to 2020, Rochester inventors’ pile of patents grew steadily , picking up speed after 2010.

Recently patent data shows the annual local patent tally is now dropping and the makeup of Rochester’s inventive blaze is rapidly changing.

IBM, the top source for patents in the U.S. and Rochester for 29 years, has dramatically reduced its patent output by focusing on “high-impact advancements.” That means it is filing for fewer simple, incremental patents and is focusing on major complex innovations including quantum computing, artificial intelligence and semiconductors.

For the first time since 1993, IBM was not the company with the most U.S. patents in 2022, as Samsung Technologies took the top spot. IBM tallied 48% fewer patents than it did in 2021. Big Blue drifted down to third place in 2023 as IBM’s patent numbers dropped 15% from 2022.

Griffin, an IBM Master Inventor, is comfortable with Big Blue’s change in strategy as it matches his journey as an inventor.

“I personally started inventing with large volumes of submissions across diverse technologies; however, my style of inventing has changed over the years,” he wrote. “The areas I am currently developing intellectual property in require much deeper levels of research, therefore the time to create, as a variable itself has increased, resulting in fewer submissions for me personally.”

He added that way of thinking “aligns logically” with IBM’s strategic areas.

“Deeper research is needed to extract greater value,” he said.

The IBM campus, which opened in 1956, collected its first Rochester patent in 1960. It was for a low-tech “Method for Assembly of Printing Apparatus.”

Rochester IBMers went on to develop and patent innovative technology such as the legendary AS/400 server. Many of the world’s fastest computers — Blue Gene/L, Roadrunner, Blue Gene/Q Mira, Blue Gene/Q Sequoia and Summit — were conceived here.

The famous Watson computer, which competed on the “Jeopardy” game show in 2011, also owed part of its creation to Rochester engineers.

Many other technological gizmos, like the Nintendo Wii’s unique remote or “Wiimote,” also got their start here.

IBM’s recent easing up on filing for patents means the total number of issued patents with a Rochester inventor’s name on them is decreasing, falling from 1,571 in 2018 to 1,233 in 2020 and down to just 640 in 2023.

To be clear, these numbers solely focus on patents where at least one inventor lists Rochester, Minnesota, as their residence. This data is simply tracking inventors by city. That means a patent with inventors from Plainview, Saint Charles or Zumbro Falls — but none from Rochester — is not included.

Patents, of course, are not the only way to document and develop a new invention. Licensing, copyrights, trademarks and various combinations are among the paths an invention can be developed in the marketplace.

While IBM is no longer pursuing as many patents each year, Mayo Clinic’s numbers are on the rise.

In 2000, IBM was issued 215 patents with a Rochester inventor and Mayo Clinic was issued 19. Mayo Clinic collected 93 Rochester patents in 2023, while IBM took home 120.

The patent shift is continuing in 2024 as Mayo Clinic’s Rochester output surpasses IBM’s. This year so far, Mayo Clinic has collected 54 Rochester patents with five issued in May alone. IBM has tallied 30 Rochester patents.

Mayo Clinic is not the only organization to top IBM, when it comes to patents with Rochester inventors. Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Corp., which owns McNeilus Truck and Manufacturing in Dodge Center, is making a mark in generating patents and inventions.

Oshkosh inventors who live in Rochester have been issued 32 garbage truck-related patents, particularly involving electric vehicles, so far in 2024. Oshkosh has been growing more and more active in recent years. In 2018, Rochester inventors were issued three Oshkosh patents. That number increased to 34 in 2020 and 53 in 2022.

Mayo Clinic is definitely generating more patents, though its leaders say that it is due to more institutional support instead of more inventiveness. Mayo Clinic has long been a leader in developing medicines, like the Nobel Prize-winning cortisone in 1921, and diagnostic devices like Resoundant’s Magnetic Resonance Elastography imaging technology.

“When I started in the business development office, we probably were half of the size that we are now and that was just five years ago. We’ve been much more intentional with working with our innovators to bring these technologies forward,” said Mayo Clinic’s Patent Liaison Supervisor Chelsea Lassiter. “Now we’re just better able to do that because we have even more resources and more staff.”

Mayo Clinic has added 40 people to the business development department since 2019 to grow it to a team of 120 people today.

While the department still has about three ideas or invention disclosures formally walking in the door every day as it did in 2019, Julie Henry said the expanded team means that more of those ideas can find a pathway toward the marketplace and hopefully patient care. Henry is one of the chairs of the business development department.

Recent activity by Mayo’s business development department shows more ideas becoming intellectual property and that Mayo Clinic is more successful at this than comparable medical institutions.

In 2021, Mayo Clinic recorded 663 invention disclosures, 157 licenses executed and the formation of 16 start-ups. Boston Children’s Hospital was second place in disclosures with 250. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center took second in licensing with 152 and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute followed Mayo in start-up formation with seven.

From 1986 to 2023, 351 start-up companies have been formed that are based on Mayo Clinic technology.

As a nonprofit organization, Mayo Clinic has only been in the patenting game for less than 50 years. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 cleared the way for nonprofit universities, medical centers and others to own and control their own intellectual property.

Prior to that act, any research or discoveries by entities like Mayo Clinic or the University of Minnesota were the property of the federal governmental entity that funded the research, like the National Institutes of Health.

“The problem was that the government owned tens of thousands of inventions and none of them were being made available to the public. They were not being commercialized,” explained Ehman. “So the Bayh-Doyle Act said that institutions could file the patents and own the patents. And then any proceeds from that had to be invested in education and research. That changed the whole picture.”

The National Academy of Inventors recently released its annual 2023 list of the top 60 nonprofit institutions and government agencies granted utility patents during the year. Mayo Clinic ranked 17th with more 2023 patents than NASA. Mayo also collected more patents than its peers including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Cleveland Clinic.

In the wake of Bayh-Doyle, Mayo Clinic created a technology transfer organization in the mid-1980s. It was originally called Mayo Medical Ventures. Today it goes by Mayo Clinic Ventures.

Ehman was one of Mayo Medical Ventures’ first “customers” as he and Mayo Clinic physicist Joel P. Felmlee patented a way to correct “motion artifacts” in patient magnetic resonance scans. Their technology was quickly adopted and is ingrained in most MRI scanners.

That patent illustrates two reasons why Ehman says Mayo Clinic is successful with developing new inventions. First, he and Felmlee saw a problem that was getting in the way of patient care. They tinkered around and found a solution to the problem.

“Many of our things are inspired, not just by some sort of an idle academic interest, but rather by some real problems that arise with our patients. We’re inspired by our practice,” he said.

Ehman also adds that Mayo Clinic’s clinical strategy, which brings people together from different departments to work together, makes innovation easier.

“Mayo has a team-based approach. The whole point is to have people work with cross functionality and cross expertise to deal with the complex medical issues that are coming our way,” said Henry. “It is no different with our innovators. We see people from five or six different specialties as inventors on one type of technology. It’s not uncommon that we see someone from cardiology and someone from radiology and someone from informatics on a patent or new disclosure together.”

Having Mayo Clinic patents with local roots doesn’t always result in a boost in Rochester’s economy, as many of the companies that license Mayo’s research are based elsewhere.

The popular Cologuard colon cancer screening test is based on Mayo Clinic research. However, Exact Sciences, which expects to generate $2.81 billion to $2.85 billion in revenue in 2024, has its headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin.

However, Rochester has seen the rapid growth of Vyriad, which is working on cancer treatments. Resoundant, a Mayo Clinic-owned company that makes devices based on Dr. Ehman’s research, is also based in Rochester.

Mayo Clinic hasn’t always generated revenue directly from medical research, and many people cite the Nobel Prize-winning cortisone discovery as a prime example.

The story is often told in Rochester that Mayo Clinic didn’t patent the research of chemist Edward Kendall and Dr. Philip Hench, who won the Nobel Prize in 1950 with Swiss researcher Dr. Tadeus Reichstein for their work creating “Compound E.” Compound E was later called cortisone and used to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

The truth is much more complicated, though the end result is the same.

Kendall did have patents on the research, along with Merck Co. and three other companies.

Following a path he used in 1921 when he developed a process to produce the thyroid substance thyroxine, Kendall gave his patents to Mayo Clinic. Dr. William Mayo, in turn, “unconditionally” presented the patent to the American Medical Association.

Kendall was quoted as stating, “No physician engaged in the practice of medicine should profit from the exploitation of any drug, vaccine or appliance used in the practice of medicine. This is the time-honored statement; it has been the policy of Mayo Clinic from the beginning.”

Mayo Clinic, along with the other patent holders, turned over the cortisone patents to a nonprofit organization, Research Corp. of New York, which allowed all of the organizations to mutually use all of the patents.

In his book, “The Quest for Cortisone,” Thom Rooke describes the results.

“Dr. Kendall never seemed to regret any of his decisions or actions, and in this case, one suspects, neither did the drug companies that benefited by his noble stand,” Rooke writes. “After all, they went on to make billions from his discovery.”