The Patent Office Could be to Blame for a US "Innovation Crisis"
Pat Choate, author of “Saving Capitalism From The Capitalists” and “Dangerous Business: The Risks of Globalization for America,” appears on Yahoo’s tech ticker to describe what he sees as America’s innovation crisis, a problem stemming from the massive backlog at the US Patent Office.
Here are a two of Choate’s key points:
- Small businesses create 55% of all breakthrough technologies… and their patent approvals are becoming a rarity. Patents awarded to entrepreneurial individuals have dropped from roughly 18 percent of approvals in the ’80s and ’90s to about 5.3 percent last year.
- Many new technologies — about 1.2 million patent applications are in need of approval — are going obsolete as they are in the pipeline waiting for review. The process now takes about three years on average, a delay that stifles business innovation and subsequently slows job creation.
See the video below, which came to our attention via The Big Picture blog at this post.
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