In business, if you’re not moving forward — you’re falling backward. Even the most traditional companies must innovate to stay relevant and competitive through changing times. A company that never changes its product is a rare thing — while the list of companies that failed or fell behind because they didn’t innovate includes some big names.

McKinsey & Company defines innovation as the “systematic practice of developing and marketing breakthrough products and services for adoption by customers.” They found that more than 80% of executives rank innovation among their top three priorities — while only 10% reckon that their company is getting it right. Perhaps that level of dissatisfaction is healthy. Only by striving for better products and fresher ways to make and sell them can a business remain sharp.

Patents are the currency of business innovation. When a patent is granted, it gives the applicant “an exclusive right to a product or a process that generally provides a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem,” according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

This may buy the company time to develop a product or monetize an idea by licensing it to other companies. As we will see below, some companies file hundreds or thousands of patents each year, partly to protect their ideas but often as a lucrative source of revenue.

To determine which companies and regions are at the sharp end of the U.S. innovation economy, OnDeck found which companies were granted the most patents in 2023 and which parts of the country had the highest proportion of inventors.