Who were 2024’s top patent and R&D leaders in computing, pharma, medtech and beyond?

Industrial and commercial sectors often measure innovation by market capitalization and R&D spending, but these metrics fail to capture the full picture. Tech companies dominate market headlines with AI product launches and chip releases — and our own ranking of most innovative firms of 2024. In addition, tech firms currently hold the top market cap positions (NVIDIA at $3.56T, Apple at $3.43T, Microsoft at $3.05T). Tech giants, too, are among the top spenders in R&D in raw dollars with Alphabet spending $12.447 billion in the third quarter while Meta invested $11.177 billion.

Raw R&D spending, however, doesn’t necessarily translate to a proportional lead in patents. Alphabet’s revenue was more than 45% more than that of Samsung Electronics on average in the first three quarters of 2024. But in the same time frame, Samsung Electronics dominated the patent landscape with 30,305 international patents – double that of Qualcomm (15,980), nearly four times Apple’s count (8,631), and five times Alphabet’s portfolio (6,146).

Oftentimes though, patent quality — measured in terms of how commonly other inventors cite a given patent — is often a more accurate predictor of financial success that patent volume. For instance, Meta Platforms, with fewer overall patents, achieves 144.51 citations per patent – the highest impact rate in our dataset. Healthcare companies like Johnson & Johnson lead in operating margins (2,451.6%) and geographic reach, with firms like Novartis (42 jurisdictions) and Pfizer (39 jurisdictions) showing the broadest international patent coverage.

In the following visualizations, we explore these metrics across sectors, from computing and communications to medical technology and biopharma and beyond. All figures are based on the most recent available data as of mid-November 2024.