CommPRO Editorial Staff

JiNan Glasgow George, recognized worldwide for her expertise in intellectual property, has offered her outlook on the Top 10 Investment Opportunities and Industry Trends for 2021.

Her analytics offer a snapshot of what’s going on with patent activity and offers a forecast on what companies are developing, offering keen insight new products and industries based on the type patents filed. George is a firm believer that patent data always leads investment trends. 

IBM continues to be a leading innovator, filing more patent last year than Samsung Electronics Co., Canon Inc., Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC and Intel. 

Here’s what George believes are the Top 10 hot investment trends and industries based on her company’s research (in alphabetical order). What her research is showing that there is 150% plus growth in money these technologies and industries. “It’s booming in each of these areas,” George says. “We can see disruption in high growth opportunities before it’s happening.”

• AI diagnostics - This category is going to create an impact across several industries, including medical, telemedicine, self-diagnostics, wearables, and sleep analytics. The trends reveal the aggressive growth in personal health management, health monitoring, and the consumer health market IBM, Boston Scientific, Psomagen, and Philips are among the companies developing technologies to gain a competitive edge. 
• Cryptocurrency / tokenization / blockchain is becoming commonplace in the areas of networks and computing, security, industrial applications and securities tokenization. Patents filed focus in such categories of tracking, finance and e-commerce. There are companies like Equity Shift, which is competing with NASDAQ’s secondary markets. This is allowing investors in private companies to have liquidity anytime they want. For investors, it’s an opportunity to see where there’s significant movement in the markets and where there are dynamic opportunities in a real-time basis. 
• Edge computing — hardware + software & platforms. The rise of demand for computing for IoT devices and 5G is going to fuel huge growth in this sector. We are now generating huge amounts of data, but we need infrastructure process it, generate responses, and make it useful. Leading patent filers in this sector are Akamai Technologies, Cisco Systems and Intel.  E.g.,Such companies as EdgeX is partnering with Atomy Institute to develop next level infrastructure. 
• Electric Vehicles, EV charging - The rise of Electric Vehicles can be attributed to the innovations of Elon Musk and everything that he has done allow EV to scale.  But the one thing he did that other automakers have not, which is extremely influential, is building a network of EV charging.  Electric Vehicles have so many advantages both for the environment and for the consumer and as consumer’s needs to manage their charging increase, it will simply necessitate innovations in EV charging and EV networks. Big questions right now are; how do we manage the data around charging and how does the wide use of EV charging impact the power grid?  
• IoT – There are a lot of companies who have created things that sense and collect data.  But right now the infrastructure to make it useful doesn’t not existed. What we are seeing is that companies are investing heavily in consumer experience, putting the data into the consumers hands so they can better understand their behaviors and make changes.  With this, we will see an increase in usefulness and adoption of IOT. 
• Materials (biodegradable, composites, smart fabrics & materials)- We are seeing huge patent filing in materials.  Consumers are demanding better, biodegradable packaging.  Additionally, we are seeing investments in composites as a method for creating cheap, strong materials for use in construction, cars, and packaging.  We’ve seen an increase in smart fabrics as well; we saw a little of this with COVID-19 with those slow-release anti-microbial fabrics, but we expect to see more of that going forward especially in the athletic apparel space.  
• Security (general) & cybersecurity- We have a lot of monitoring capabilities in place for physical security; but we do not have the necessary infrastructure for data surrounding that monitoring.  We are seeing heavy investment in automatic response.  Cyber security is an increasing concern especially as we move into the mobile and crypto space; we are seeing heavy investment in technology from fintech.  
• Smart Cities — We have been discussing smart cities for a long time, but have not seen much implementation. Why? The communications and other infrastructure required to transform cities into truly smart cities have only just been implemented.  This includes many important components: 5G, wireless spectrum management, V2X comms, essential services automation, traffic management.  The amount of data that is going to be circling is just mind-numbing and right now there isn’t the infrastructure to manage, process, and use that data. 
• UAVs/drones — Unmanned air vehicles have applications for everything from security to delivery. Many states have become very aggressive in creating drone corridors and regulation around drone airspace.  In 2021 we are seeing the regulation catch up with the existing technology and we are predicting explosive growth for drone manufacturing companies.  
• V/R, A/R — There’s no stopping developments in new entertainment and modernizing visualization.  The way we interact with the world is forever changed.  We aren’t traveling and we are interacting via zoom; people are so bored and are looking for more compelling and interactive options.  The patent investment supports all of this.