Building the Next Patent System: A Blueprint for U.S. Innovation

Building the Next Patent System: A Blueprint for U.S. Innovation

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The U.S. patent system is no longer operating as a coherent innovation framework. Over time, it has become a patchwork of overlapping tribunals, inconsistent legal standards, procedural inefficiencies, and doctrinal barriers that make it harder to obtain, defend, and enforce even high-quality patent rights that cover innovations of great consequence. At the same time, artificial intelligence, software-driven innovation, and remarkably groundbreaking pharmaceutical, biotech and medical diagnostics innovations are exposing just how poorly the current system aligns with modern realities of innovation and commercialization.

We are beyond the point of discussing targeted fixes. The question is what a functioning patent system should look like if the goal is to promote innovation, investment, competition, and technological leadership.

This panel will move beyond narrow debates over pending legislation, individual USPTO rules packages, and the latest swings in PTAB policy. Instead, it will ask the larger structural question: if the United States were undertaking a serious modernization of patent law today—akin to the reforms embodied in the 1952 Patent Act—what should be changed? The discussion will examine the foundational legal and institutional reforms necessary to create a system that is fairer, faster, more predictable, and better suited for the 21^st century innovation economy.

Panelists will address some of the most consequential pressure points in the current system, including patent eligibility under Section 101, the practical unavailability of injunctions in federal court, whether the obviousness framework after KSR is serving innovation policy in the way it should, and how to make PTAB proceedings more balanced for patent owners and challengers alike.

The conversation will also confront a growing structural problem that is impossible to ignore: patent disputes are now spread across district courts, the PTAB, and the ITC, often with overlapping issues, different procedural rules, different standards, duplicative costs, and unnecessary redundancy. A central focus of this discussion will be how to rationalize and streamline these forums so that patent disputes can be resolved more efficiently and with greater consistency.

The objective is not incremental tinkering around the edges. It is to begin defining the principles of a modern patent system that actually works for innovators, startups, universities, investors, established companies, and the public. This panel is intended to launch a broader reform conversation—one focused not on restoring the past, but on designing a patent system that can meet the demands of the future and strengthen American innovation over the long term.