That is one of the questions United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) director David Kappos asks himself – and the intellectual property community at large – in a brief but important interview granted to Fast Company. It is a particularly important these days of open innovation, open source, creative commons, and patent reform to bring to the foreground this type of interrogatories.
Are Patents the Answer?
For a long time, the number of patent filings has been widely quoted as a prime indicator of innovation. For the last few years, for example, IBM has been credited with the highest number of patent filings and grants of any US-based corporation, at a rate of 2,500 patents issued per year (See IBM’s Patent Portfolio). That number does not necessarily reflect innovation because, among other issues, it does not correlate with the number or value of actual products or services brought to market, or new technologies deployed and, most importantly, it does not consider innovations that are not patented.
Innovation in Mobile
As Director Kappos points out in the interview, large parts of the clearly innovative technology industry are powered by open-source software. Consider the prime example of the Android operating system for mobile platforms, which these days is the operating system behind the fastest growing segments of the smart phone and tablet computing segments (See iSuppli Press Release). On the other hand, many companies seek patents to stifle competition and, to that extent, innovation. A clear example of this problem is also the current environment in the mobile phone/computing segments where a veritable web of lawsuits links most players in the industry, including Apple, Motorola, HTC, Microsoft, Oracle (Java), RIM, and Nokia (See e.g., Wired).
Innovative Alternatives
In part as a consequence of the type of environment illustrated by the mobile industry, the open innovation movement has emerged in recent years as an alternative to foster decentralized and collaborative efforts to bring innovations to market. Re-born out of Henry Chesbrough’s 2003 book, Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology
(Boston, Harvard Business School Press), the open innovation paradigm aims to foster the transfer and dissemination of ideas first, rather than prioritizing patent licensing and exclusive research.
An Open Question
If the promotion of research and development efforts aiming at prompting innovation leading to new sustainable technologies and improved consumer products is important, then the question of measuring innovation is more than an academic or rhetorical one. From our perspective, identifying the key indicators of the scope and speed of innovation is relevant if we are to optimally allocate effort, people, and resources to accelerate not just an economic recovery, but the continued improvement of the standard of living in all areas of the globalized economy.