Tell the White House (Directly!) How "Obstacles to Innovation" Can Be Removed
The White House has started a great new program called "Advise the Advisor," where a member of the President’s senior staff posts a short video on issues being considered by the White House. In turn, the public gets an opportunity to post advice, feedback and opinions about key issues (provided your post is 2500 words or less).
According to the web site, "we’ll read through as much of your feedback as possible and post a summary of what you had to say a few days after the video is posted."
Today's topic:
- How is American innovation affecting your community?
- What are the obstacles to innovation that you see in
your community? And what steps can be taken to remove them?
Posts
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Businessweek has published it's annual Innovative Companies" article, which is supported by a survey and some assessment of the state of innovation. It appears to demonstrate that most of the innovative firms in the US are larger, Fortune 500 firms, and that the rest of the world is rapidly overtaking the US as innovators. There is even a statement that "innovation does not have to have anything to do with technology" which I am sure is surprising news for many of you in the innovation space.
As you can tell, I'm appreciative for the research but find it very cursory at best. Businessweek seems to scan the horizons for large, successful firms it can talk to about innovation, and many of those that have had recent successes are likely to participate. IBM is quoted, along with usual suspects like Starbucks, Apple, Research in Motion, Toyota, Proctor & Gamble, 3M and Nokia. It's quite possible that all of these firms are very innovative, or quite possible they are the ones talking about their innovation work and able to get on the radar screen of Businessweek. What's really telling is the four obstacles that were defined for innovation success.
obstacles to innovation:
Federal taxes are way too high and the federal government is way too intrusive. Both are a terrible disincentive to even form a business.
Also, patents which are the basis of tech start-ups take too long to get, are too expensive, and too hard to get. Having to fight to get our patents is an outrage. Once having gone through the process no one wants to do it again. Even if we are successful at getting patents they are expensive and difficult to enforce against large infringers. That is another terrible disincentive to invest in new technologies. These days, even if infringers of small entities’ patents are found guilty we cant get an injunction and therefore we can’t obtain funds to commercialize. If we cant stop our competitors from using our technology, it's not worth creating it. There have been many other changes in the courts that make it harder for us to enforce our patents. If you want us to innovate, we need stronger patent laws and a more reasonable Patent Office that doesn’t force us to fight them to get our patents.
For a detailed analysis of patent issues, please see http://truereform.piausa.org.
The statement "innovation does not have anything to do with technology" is clearly a generalization that is factually incorrect.
However, if he had said that "innovation does not just mean technological innovation", I would have wholeheartedly agreed.
What a nice change, to see the White House more proactively work toward improvement and enhancement of innovation in general and the patent law system in particular. Nevertheless, as former CAFC Chief Judge Paul Michel has recently pointed out, it's particularly important for the government to pay more heed to the needs of start-ups, rather than continuing Congress's inordinate focus on the needs of large corporations. Since some of our legislators are probably shareholders in some of those large corporations, however, I don't know how likely they are to change their ways.
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