Strategy and Reporting
The USPTO Strategic Plan was created to help focus the USPTO's energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, and to assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment. This effort involves setting goals, and developing objectives for achieving those goals. As part of the strategic planning process, the USPTO's executive leadership team sought a broad range of perspectives from employees, customers and external stakeholders, in a bottom up, collaborative process. The results of the input received from employees and stakeholders were summarized and discussed by the leadership team, which formulated the final plan.
Download the USPTO Strategic Plan 2007-2012
Please e-mail questions regarding this plan to StrategicPlanning1@uspto.gov .
Fiscal Year 2008 Performance and Accountability Report (PAR)
Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 was a remarkable year for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). FY 2008 demonstrated the USPTO’s commitment to sustaining high performance in a year where our patent and trademark operations rose to the highest performance levels in our history. It was also a year of growing international interests and expansion of our collaborative efforts with intellectual property (IP) offices around the globe.
The key components of the USPTO’s goals and objectives are to ensure high quality and timely examination of patent and trademark applications. These two factors are critical to the protection of America’s valuable IP resources and to our innovation and competitiveness worldwide. That is why several years ago we embarked on a steady yet arduous path of continual improvement of our operations. As part of this process, we put in place numerous initiatives to improve the quality of examinations, reassuring right-holders of the high-quality products they receive. This resulted in six years of continual improvement.
In FY 2008, we built upon our past successes, and the USPTO can be proud it met 100 percent of its goals established pursuant to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993.
Highlights of USPTO accomplishments for the past year include:
- Maintained its high level of quality, achieving patent allowance compliance rate of 96.3 percent and a trademark first action compliance rate of 95.8 percent.
- Increased patent production by an additional 14 percent over 2007 by examining 448,003 applications – the highest number in our history. Production has increased by 38.6 percent over the past four years, compared to a 21.3 percent increase in application filings during the same period.
- Examined the patent filings in the Accelerated Examination Program, which rose 173 percent over its introduction last year and maintained 12-month pendency – or less – for every application in the program, with an average time to final action or allowance of 186 days, or just over 6 months.
- Trademarks saw a record number of applications filed electronically with approximately 268,000 applications comprising 390,000 classes. This represented a record rate of filing, 96.9 percent of applications were filed electronically.
- Maintained first action trademark pendency within the 2.5 to 3.5 month range for more than 18 months, a historic first. Disposal pendency was also maintained at record low levels, ending the year with 13.9 months, the lowest in 20 years.
- Received record numbers of patent and trademark applications filed electronically, achieving electronically filed application rates of 72.1 percent and 96.9 percent, respectively.
- Hosted the follow-up to the Heads of Offices meeting for the five largest IP Offices (Europe, Japan, Korea, China and the United States) to discuss further cooperative initiatives to meet the growing patent application filing demands and improve patent quality.
Download the FY2008 USPTO Performance and Accountability Report (PAR)
You can view previous reports by visiting the PAR archive.
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