International patent applications grew by 1.7 per cent last year, with Chinese innovators accounting for much of the growth, UN agency WIPO said in its annual report.
The United States has filed the greatest number of patents of any country every year for nearly forty decades.
In 2015 American companies filed 57,385 patents, down 6.7 per cent from a year earlier.
Japan filed 44,235 patents, and China 29,846.
Among individual countries, China clocked up the greatest growth rate in filings last year, followed by South Korea, Israel, Switzerland, Japan and the Netherlands.
Most patent filings came from telecommunication companies, with China's Huawei Technologies leading the pack for the second year running, ahead of US company Qualcomm and Chinese company ZTE.