The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has picked North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus in Raleigh as the site of a brand-new Community Engagement Office, giving the state its first dedicated federal outpost for patent and trademark help. The agency made the announcement on August 18, and the office is billed as a resource hub for inventors, small businesses, veterans and entrepreneurs across North Carolina and the wider Southeast.
According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Raleigh site was created to expand intellectual property outreach and resources across North Carolina and the broader Southeast region. Placing the office at Centennial Campus puts it inside one of the state's most active research and commercialization hubs, where corporate, government and academic partners already work in close proximity, as the NC State Office of Research Commercialization has noted, pointing to the campus's James B. Hunt Jr. Library, which hosted the National Academy of Inventors Annual Conference in June 2024.
Senator Thom Tillis framed the announcement as a personal and political win, writing in a post on X that it was “a big win for North Carolina innovators” and crediting his work with the late Senator Patrick Leahy to bring more USPTO resources to the Southeast. Tillis said the new office will help North Carolina inventors, entrepreneurs and universities turn ideas into reality.
A Law Years in the Making
The office fulfills statutory requirements under the Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022, a bipartisan law Tillis and Leahy authored that was signed into law in December 2022, according to the U.S. House of Representatives Press Office. That 2022 legislation required the USPTO to expand outreach to underrepresented inventors and establish regional offices nationwide. U.S. Representative Deborah Ross co-led the House companion version of the act, and the same House press office reports that in March, Ross and Tillis submitted a joint bipartisan letter urging the USPTO to select the Research Triangle for the new outreach location.
The Raleigh office becomes the USPTO's sixth Community Engagement Office nationwide, joining existing university-partnered locations in Montana, Utah, Georgia, Alabama and New Hampshire, per the agency. Those engagement offices complement five larger regional offices and more than 100 designated resource centers across the country. The selection came under USPTO Director John A. Squires, who took office as Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property in September 2025 and has prioritized reducing application backlogs while placing engagement nodes in major innovation hubs.
Why the Research Triangle Made the Cut
The numbers behind the decision are substantial. Resident patent filings across North Carolina grew by 35% between 2019 and 2024, according to USPTO data cited by NCBiotech. The Research Triangle's three primary Tier 1 research institutions — NC State, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — generated $3.9 billion in combined annual research and development expenditures in 2024, according to National Science Foundation data referenced in the same report.
That academic R&D engine has long served as a catalyst for local patent applications and tech spin-offs, and it appears to have made the case for locating a federal resource here rather than elsewhere in the region. The office's service territory under the 2022 law spans ten states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.
What the Office Will Actually Do
Practically speaking, the Community Engagement Office will give individual inventors, small businesses, veterans and rural entrepreneurs local access to patent filing assistance and federal trademark registration information, according to the NC State College of Engineering. The goal is to connect inventors and small businesses with federal resources earlier in the intellectual property development process, rather than after they have already run into filing hurdles.
Tillis, who currently chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, has made patent policy a signature issue; Hoodline previously reported on his push to reform patent eligibility laws after taking that subcommittee helm. Centennial Campus, meanwhile, has increasingly become a go-to venue for the region's public and academic gatherings, having also hosted last week's Raleigh Book Fest business marketplace event.
Several details remain unsettled. Neither the USPTO nor NC State has released the office's exact physical opening date, staffing levels, or specifics on how it will coordinate with existing local business incubators. Those operational questions are likely to surface as the office moves from announcement to reality on Centennial Campus.
