09/08/10 Stockholm, Sweden – 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.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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If applications are becoming obsolete in the 3 years it takes to review them, and this prevents hiring, then that is actually good, because those jobs were unsustainable to begin with.
is it still true the Patent Office still operates much as it did since the founding fathers created it?
No such thing as “intellectual property”. It’s intangible. Just using illegitimate government force to gain a preference for oneself or ones firm, at the expense of the public.