The patent place in aggregate — a floor count, a county instrument, no invented rank

COUNTS AS OF NOVEMBER 2026 · EVERY NUMBER WITH ITS INSTRUMENT

Aggregate patent statistics are kept by residence of the first-named inventor, which is the one convention under which this section's whole subject exists, so the aggregate article can be written — carefully. At state strength, the verified frame is Indiana's: 1,627 utility patents granted to Indiana-resident first inventors in 2023, a state rank of 22nd, and 13,267 total patents across 2018–2023, rank 19th (StatsAmerica from USPTO data, generated 10 November 2026). At county strength, the instrument exists and is named: the Federal Reserve's FRED series PATENTCOUNTY18141, "U.S. Granted Utility Patents Originating in St. Joseph County, IN," annual, built from the USPTO county file on the same first-inventor-residence rule — but its run covers 2000–2015 only, released 6 April 2021, and its year-by-year values could not be read from the open copy reached in this section. The county count therefore stands as a named gap: settler, the FRED download for PATENTCOUNTY18141 or the USPTO countyall table beneath it, one sitting's work for whoever holds download access. At place strength there is no published instrument at all: PatentsView geocodes inventor addresses to counties and metropolitan areas, not to census-designated places, and no official count of "Granger patents" exists to quote. What this section can state with a count behind it is its own floor: the sixteen granted United States patents verified article by article in this section that carry a Granger-resident inventor — the carbon-brake, glucose-sensor and piggyBac families — against a designated-place population of 30,337 at the 2020 census. That is a floor built from named faces, not a density measured by any statistical office, and it is printed as a floor. A rank is claimed for nothing: not for the county, whose count is unread, and not for the place, whose count no instrument keeps.

Sources:

1. StatsAmerica / USPTO patent counts, generated 10 Nov 2026 — Indiana utility patents 2023: 1,627, rank 22; total patents 2018–2023: 13,267, rank 19.
2. FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — series PATENTCOUNTY18141 (St. Joseph County, IN), annual 2000–2015, released 6 Apr 2021; instrument and vintage verified, values not reached — the named gap in the text.
3. USPTO county-file explanation of data (patent origin determined by residence of the first-named inventor); Population, as banked (Granger CDP population 30,337, 2020 census).