P&W Inventor's Day: Engineers' Spirit of Innovation Powers and Protects Pratt & Whitney's Future
Pratt & Whitney's spirit of innovation is alive and well as demonstrated by the engineers and engineering teams who earned more than 600 patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2012 and 2013. Just as importantly, by patenting their inventions, these engineers are securing 20 years of exclusivity, thereby protecting Pratt & Whitney's future in the competitive aerospace industry.
Their achievements were recently honored during the P&W Inventor's Reception at the P&W Museum in East Hartford, Conn. While P&W's engineers never run out of creative solutions for maintaining the aerospace giant's competitive edge, the P&W Museum did run out of wall space for displaying approximately 1,600 commemorative plaques during the event.
The 2013 Leahy-Smith America Invents Act shifted the United States from a "first-to-invent" to a "first-to-file" patent system. With Pratt & Whitney patents accounting for about 50 percent of the total patents filed by UTC in 2013, it seems clear that Pratt & Whitney has increased its emphasis on patents and to winning that race thus earning recognition for UTC as one of the 100 Top Global Innovators by Thomson.
