Among the many barriers to innovation success, one of the most painful and dangerous is rapidly gaining momentum in the United States due to an almost perfect storm of challenges to patent value. I speak of the blight of “efficient infringers,” the many companies, often large and politically influential, who make the cruel calculation that …
Efficient Infringers: A Vibrant Source of Innovation Fatigue Read More »
Under the America Invents Act, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was given broad new powers to “correct” past mistakes in issuing patents through the power given to the PTAB, the Patent Trials and Appeals Board. The PTAB is an administrative law that decides issues of patentability, formed on September 16, 2012 under …
A Surprising Insight About the USPTO’s “Patent Death Squad” Read More »
A book on World War II teaches a lesson for today on innovation. In Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Pulitzer-prize winning author Thomas E. Ricks (New York: Penguin, 2017), we learn about some of the reasons England struggled to defend itself effectively in dealing with Germany. A key problem discussed by Ricks …
Innovation Fatigue: How Britain Almost Lost the War Against Hitler Read More »
China’s housing market is in a bubble, in my opinion, for it seems to display some of the same excesses and questionable behavior that the United States had in real estate shortly before the big subprime mortgage crash in 2007. We have a flood of newly created cash flowing into the market at low interest …
The Housing Market in China: Warning Signs of a Bubble Economy Read More »
The US Supreme Court recently ruled that “abstract” concepts are not eligible for patents. The 2014 case, Alice Corporation Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Intl. or more simply Alice, is said by some to mean the death of thousands of patents if not entire industries. Critics such as Gene Quinn say it is unworkable, vague and …
As we’ve discussed previously on this blog, the West often gets things completely backwards when it comes to China, and the misunderstandings can be serious barriers to Asian innovators seeking global markets. The “Tragedy of Chopsticks” helps illustrate this. A few years ago while in the US, I became concerned about chopsticks in China. The …
The Tragedy of Chopsticks: Getting Things Straight in China Read More »
There’s an anti-patent sentiment in some parts of the public that argues that they are destroying the economy rather than helping. There is particular resentment against non-practicing entities (NPEs), often called trolls, for owning (and typically acquiring large numbers of) patents for products and processes that they don’t actually use themselves. That sentiment, naturally, is …
Patents: Sucking the Lifeblood from the Economy?? Read More »
In the United States and many other nations, a question is being asked by many who struggle with the brutal reality of innovation fatigue. In many sectors, it is taking bigger investments, longer times, and much more pain to deliver innovation, and much of what passes for innovation in some sectors ends up being incremental …
Doug Gross at CNN has a list of the top 10 tech product failures in recent years (hat tip to Greg Aharonian’s Patnews newsletter). The list includes: LaserDisc Apple Newton Google Wave Segway Microsoft KIN Pets.com TwitterPeak Atari Jaguar HD-DVD Virtual Reality Some great ideas and even some cool technology went into most of these …
Innovators and business leaders doing their best to achieve commercial success need to understand the set of innovation fatigue factors that they face. These include personal factors due to the bad behavior of individuals; corporate or organizational fatigue factors reflecting inadequate systems, culture, or flawed judgment; and external fatigue factors due to the burdens of …