Less than three weeks after wrapping up public comments to figure out where to plop down a new outreach office, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office picked Montana to replace an operation that has been in Denver since 2014.
The new space will be one of the “first of several” community engagement offices, described as “an agile model to meet innovators where they are,” according to an agency news release Monday. It will be housed at Montana State University in Bozeman and represent the eight-state region that includes Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
That territory was previously covered by the Rocky Mountain Regional Outreach Office in Denver, which the agency plans to permanently close in April. After the closure was announced Oct. 1, it asked the public where a new community outreach location should be located. Comments were closed on Nov. 28 — three weeks ago.
The Patent and Trademark Office called the Bozeman-Gallatin Valley region an “anchor of the state’s growing tech hub corridor.” Montana was named a federal Tech Hub for photonic technologies in 2023 at the same time the Denver-Boulder region earned a similar designation for quantum computing.
The agency also said that patent applications from Montana inventors had “more than doubled” between 2019 and 2023. It declined to elaborate.
But annual data on patents issued by state compiled by the University of Kansas doesn’t show that Montana inventors experienced the same rate of receiving patents. Between 2021 and 2024, Montana inventors were issued 236 patents last year, up 26.2% over the three-year period. That was the highest growth rate of the Rocky Mountain region states.
Colorado has more than 15 times the number of patents than Montana, with local inventors issued 3,645 patents last year. But with the larger number, it had a slower growth rate of 4.3% in the same period.
Over the years, Montana has typically ranked in the bottom 10 states for the number of patents filed by a state’s own residents, according to U.S. patent data. Colorado, on the other hand, tends to be among the top 15 states.
The USPTO declined to comment further on the data and the new office.
The federal agency announced the closure of the Denver office because the in-person employee count had dropped to “less than 10” at the end of last year. Other reasons included the general expense of operating a “typical regional office,” costing more than $1 million in leases and overhead.
But that sum was disputed by many associated with the Denver office, including Molly Kocialski, who resigned as the regional director in early September. At the time, she said that the number of staff and patent examiners had grown to 354 in the Rocky Mountain region with about 230 in Colorado. Most were working remotely and weren’t required to be in the office.
Kocialski said Thursday that she wasn’t surprised Montana was picked. But she said the choice appears to ignore criteria set by the Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022 for community engagement offices to be in locations with at least one public and one private institution of higher education and no more than 15 registered patent attorneys.
“There is no institution of private higher learning in Bozeman, Montana, and in addition there are more than (15) patent attorneys in Bozeman,” she said.
The nearest private college to Bozeman appears to be Carroll College in Helena, about 100 miles to the northwest.
U.S. Rep. Diana Degette, a Denver Democrat, had also sent a letter to USPTO’s director John A. Squires on Oct. 31 asking for more details about the closure and who had made the decision. As of last week, her office had still not received a response, according to a spokesperson.
When the regional office, based out of the Byron G. Rogers Federal Building in downtown Denver, opened 11 years ago, there was space for patent examiners and Patent Trials and Appeals Board judges, as well as special rooms where the public could listen and watch hearings.
It was the result of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011, which required the creation of three satellite offices plus one in Detroit, to better reach inventors outside of the Washington, D.C., area. It also aimed to improve patent examiner retention and attract talent from other parts of the country, especially those who didn’t want to live in D.C. Detroit was the first office picked and was named in the act. Denver was the second satellite office, followed by Dallas, San Jose, California and Alexandria, Virginia.
None of the other regional offices have been shut down.
Community outreach offices are smaller and target areas with growing entrepreneurial activity and employees will work with intellectual-property lawyers, startups and job-growth accelerators, according to the patent office.