How IITB’s Departments Fare in terms of Patents

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August 28, 2016

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Chief Editors: Ayush Agarwal (210100035@iitb.ac.in), Ishita Poddar (21b030016@iitb.ac.in)
Mail to: insight@iitb.ac.in

IIT Bombay has always been a frontrunner in terms of ideas and innovation. In fact, IITB was awarded the National Intellectual Property Award, 2015 for being the Top India Academic Institution for Patents. Of course, we wanted to see the numbers behind the scenes, and decided to take a look at all the patents IITB has filed in the last few years. Since 2000, researchers in the institute have filed over 500 patents.

As you can see, the growth in recent years has been phenomenal, with over a hundred patents filed just in 2015. However, a large chunk of these patents are coming from a few departments. Here’s a look at the number of patents filed by each department, over the years, since 2005:

Circle area denotes the number of patents filed in year x by department y

Most of the larger circles are clearly concentrated among the Electrical and Mechanical departments. The difference has been more stark in recent years. In fact, the top 4 departments (Elec, Mech, Bio, Chemistry) together contribute 65% of all the patents filed by IITB!  To some extent this is because of the nature of the work done in each department – certain departments tend to focus more on product-centric output, while others lean towards theoretical research.

It can also be seen that while certain departments have been ramping up the patent activity over the years, others are still producing these in bursts.
A surprising thing we noticed in our analysis was that the month of June sees almost twice as many patents filed as most other months! So the next time your guide tells you that students don’t work hard over the summers, point them here 😉
Footnotes:

1. Data for some departments has been combined in cases when the departments merged – e.g. Bio-Medical Engineering with Biosciences & Bioengineering
2. All data was obtained courtesy of IRCC, IITB
3. The source code is available on Github if you want to play around with the visualisations

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