More than half the patents in the U.S. are issued west of the Mississippi, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Monday opened the first of three new permanent satellite offices to help process them.
After 18 months in temporary Lakewood digs, the Colorado satellite office opened in the Byron G. Rogers Federal Building at 1961 Stout St. in downtown Denver.
The Denver office is the second satellite location after Detroit, which opened in 2012, and the first west of the Mississippi. Two more are coming next year, in Dallas and Silicon Valley, which will place one office in each time zone.
The offices were approved by Congress in 2011 after U.S. Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, both Democrats, sponsored an amendment to create them, though their opening was delayed by mandatory budget cuts known as sequestration.
Members on both sides of Colorado’s congressional delegation applauded the effort Monday. “It took all of us to bring it here,” said Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Lakewood.
The satellite locations are intended to make the U.S. Patent Office more accessible to businesses and help cut its backlog of applications.
The Denver office will review patent applications and house 20 patent judges who will handle appeals. The regional locations will help small and mid-sized businesses, officials say, because inventors and their lawyers won’t have to travel to Alexandria, Va., to handle patent issues.
The Denver office is expected to create an economic impact of $440 million in its first five years.
About 120 people will be hired in the Denver office in its first year, including 100 to review applications. Hiring beyond that hasn’t yet been decided, said Michelle Lee, deputy director of the U.S. Patent Office.
The U.S. Patent Office now employs about 12,000 people. Adding the four satellites will boost the job roster by about 4 percent.
Each satellite office features a courtroom, public databases of patent records and a conference room where applicants can talk to officials in Virginia.
“It’s a great example of Washington coming to the innovation community and not requiring the innovation community to come out to Washington,” Lee said.
The patent office issued about 140,000 patents in fiscal year 2013, and more than half of them — about 74,000 — came from states west of the Mississippi River.
“This was never just about Denver,” said Denver Mayor Michael Hancock. “It was about our region and our state.”
The top patent-producing state was California, but Colorado was among the fastest-growing. The state’s 3,002 patents marked a 15.6 percent increase over the year before, more than the national average of 6.4 percent.
And, according to a Brookings Institution assessment, four of the 100 most innovative metro areas in the U.S. — Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs — are within driving distance of the new office.
Bennet said the new office was a recognition of innovation that has happened, and is happening, in Colorado — from a young David Packard tinkering in a Pueblo garage to Nikola Tesla experimenting with electricity in Colorado Springs. “I think this helps brand the Rocky Mountain region as a forward-looking region, which it is,” Bennet said.
Thad Moore: 303-954-1902, tsmoore@denverpost.com or twitter.com/thadmoore
About 74,000 patents originated west of the mississippi in 2013. here’s where they came from:
California — 36,814
Texas — 9,289
Washington — 6,169
Minnesota — 4,556
Colorado — 3,002
Oregon — 2,556
Arizona — 2,404
Utah — 1,392
Missouri — 1,238
Kansas — 1,077
Idaho — 968
Nevada — 936
Iowa — 901
Oklahoma — 578
New Mexico — 451
Louisiana — 420
Nebraska — 351
Arkansas — 241
Hawaii — 141
Wyoming — 138
North Dakota — 130
South Dakota — 128
Montana — 127
Alaska — 48
