Posts Tagged: "innovation"

Senator McCain’s remarks related to defense acquisition reform generally, but more specifically related to the need for the Department of Defense to streamline acquisition of new, innovative technologies. McCain told the audience that ”our Defense Department has grown larger but less capable, more complex but less innovative, more proficient at defeating low-tech adversaries but more vulnerable to high-tech ones.” Indeed, with an agency as large as the Department of Defense, a woefully inadequate response to technological advances and adoption of cutting edge innovation should be anticipated.

Any story about innovation that starts with Leonardo da Vinci is one worth telling. The fact that the great French philosopher René Descartes also plays a starring role in the history of the contact lens makes this story of innovation all the more noteworthy. Conceived in the earliest parts of the 16th century, 34 million Americans wear thin film contact lenses over their eyes for some form of vision enhancement. The first true contact lenses was created by Swiss physicist A.E. Fick in 1888, when the lens maker fabricated a spherical glass segment for the correction of refractive errors in a wearer’s eyes.

Science has found it difficult to answer the many risks of harm to body and property which earthquakes cause. Technologies meant to enable the prediction of earthquakes have not worked out in the past and researchers are still unable to predict the location and magnitude of the next big quake. In the meantime, there has been plenty of research and development leading to the creation of tools and techniques that have saved lives from the incredible destruction of a violent shift in fault lines.

The first decade of the 21st century saw some major advances in bionic arm technologies. The first half of that decade saw a team of researchers working together at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago’s Center for Bionic Medicine crafted a bionic arm for Jesse Sullivan, a high-power electrical lineman who lost both of his arms in May 2001 as the result of electrocution. The bionic arm is myoelectric, meaning that it is capable of detecting electrical signals generated by the muscles of the human body. To increase the control signals that can be detected from the body, doctors at RIC’s Neural Engineering Center for Artificial Limbs performed a series of nerve-muscle grafts to move nerves which used to travel to the arms into the chest muscles. By increasing the number of control signals that can be read from the patient’s nerves, doctors were able to outfit Sullivan with a working bionic arm that could be controlled naturally from his nerve impulses.

Confiscating other people’s property is hardly the way to stimulate prosperity or creativity. If it were, Venezuela would be one of the richest, most innovative countries in the world instead of a place where you can’t buy toilet paper. It’s not a coincidence that the handful of countries developing new drugs and the wonders of biotechnology are also those with strong patent systems. Patents and licenses are the life blood of many start-up companies that drive our economy. Rather than being a “tax on innovation,” a strong patent system is even more important today than when the Founding Fathers gave the protection of intellectual property a prominent place in our Constitution, preceding the Bill of Rights.

Nanotechnologies are proving to have a major impact on oil spill cleanup innovation in recent years. Researchers at Ohio State University have pioneered a type of mesh coated with a fluorosurfactant, a material which attracts water but repels oil. The mesh has many nanoparticle bumps sandwiched between layers of polymer, which increase the mesh’s surface area and its ability to repel oil. The idea is to pump contaminated water through the mesh to more easily separate oil from the water. Microorganisms have also shown effectiveness in consuming large amounts of oil and oil-eating bacteria like Thalassolituus oleivorans and members of the genus Oleispira have been thriving in the Gulf.

There have been reports of technological advances which could make bionic vision a reality. One company, Occumetrics Technology Corp. of British Columbia, Canada, has been making a stir with claims of a bionic lens which could help recipients to see three times better than a human’s normal visual acuity, which we commonly refer to as “20/20 vision.” The lens can purportedly be painlessly implanted into a person’s eye in a procedure similar to cataract surgery. The company claims that the replacement operation could be performed as an outpatient procedure that takes less than 10 minutes to complete.

Global innovation continued to climb during 2014 but at the slowest pace seen since the global economic recession hit in 2009. The Reuters report didn’t draw any specific conclusions as to why the innovation slowdown had occurred but did draw a correlation between published scientific literature and patenting activities, noting that the former typically precedes the latter by three to five years. As graphs published in the Reuters study clearly show, scientific literature publications in 12 industries increased between 2008 and 2009 at a slower rate than prior years, mirroring the patenting slowdown experienced this year. Troublingly, a steep drop in published scientific literature was experienced in 2010, so if this model holds we may see a reduction in global patenting activity when the annual Reuters innovation study comes out next year.

I recently received an inquiry from an IPWatchDog reader, posing several questions about the links between intellectual property protections, innovation and job creation. (Thank you, Marcus!) The interrelated nature of IP, innovation and jobs is essential to economic prosperity and important enough to explore again. Marcus:   I’m curious about two positions that are taken in your writing. First, you state…

Corporate investment into research and development at John Deere has also fallen slightly but the company did manage to maintain a $341.1 million R&D investment during the most recent fiscal quarter. Since the beginning of 2015, Deere & Company has received a total of 92 patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. According to Innography’s text cluster (see left), much of Deere’s innovation is focused on work vehicles, tractors and harvesters. We were intrigued to note, however, that a sizable chunk of Deere’s recent inventions relate to a display screen with icon, indicating a healthy amount of software development at the company.

The first ever CES Asia took place between May 25th and 27th in Shanghai, China. The inaugural industry event showcased the many different technologies that will be entering China’s consumer market in the coming months and years. The three-day exposition was the first Chinese technology trade show coordinated with the Consumer Electronics Association since 2012. More than 200 companies came from 15 countries to display emerging consumer technologies from knockoff versions of Google Glass to home cinema technologies. The forecasts for the Chinese consumer market for emerging technologies would give any technology developer reason to believe that nothing but fair weather awaits them in that country.

Images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope also helped the global science community learn more about the formation of planets and galaxies. In 1995, Hubble captured images in the Orion Nebula of intense radiation jets reaching trillions of miles long as well as the gaseous protoplanetary disks which serve as raw material for the stars and planets of a forming solar system. Other planetary discoveries pioneered by Hubble researchers include the first visible-light image ever captured of a planet outside of our solar system, Fomalhaut b, located 25 light years from earth in the Piscis Australis constellation.

It is important to emphasize that we are not claiming that the patent system as currently defined cannot be improved. Rather, we offer evidence on two interrelated predictions of the SEP hold-up hypothesis. First, if SEPs are holding up innovation, then products that are highly reliant upon SEPs should experience more stagnant quality-adjusted prices than similar non-SEP-reliant products. Second, if SEPs are holding-up innovation, then changes in the legal system (eBay) that weaken the excessive negotiating strength of SEP holders should accelerate reductions in quality-adjusted prices in SEP-reliant industries relative to non-SEP-reliant industries. We find no evidence for either prediction.

Patents provide a competitive advantage, and those sophisticated in business know enough to look for and exploit whatever competitive advantage exists. Patents are the 800 pound gorilla of competitive advantage, but realize if you are going to want and need significant sums of money from investors rarely does a single invention or patent command attention. No one wants to invest significant funds into a company that has a one-and-done approach to innovation. That is why the most valuable inventions will have applicability in a variety of fields, and will have a variety of different implementations, alternatives and variations.

While Chinese President Xi is cracking down on political dissidents and solidifying his power over the army, the country has begun a huge push for innovation. While it’s easy for us to look askance at that proposition, we may be about to launch an equally quixotic experiment of our own: seeing if American innovation can survive the undermining of our patent system.