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October 23, 2007
Snippets on the role of patents
From Business Week - A Life in Invention: Xerox's chief scientist Robert Loce talks with Jessie Scanlon:
On collaboration:
These days it's hard to come up with a really useful widget. You have to integrate what you're doing into a system. And when you're working with a system you have to work with experts in multiple fields. So, for instance, I'm an imaging scientist, but I might need to work with experts in sensors and programming and actuators. To have an invention that's really critical, you need people with different skills working together.
On the innovation process:
Occasionally I'm part of the product team that actually helps develop a finished product. Other times I've invented something, and thrown it over the wall to good engineers who improve my idea and get it to work. Finally, if a Xerox product team isn't interested, I work with the Xerox licensing department to find an outside organization interested in the technology.
On defensive patenting:
A patent is really a contract you have with the government to prevent others from doing your idea.
. . .
in the late 1980s, Xerox was issued a patent on one of my inventions that sat dormant for quite a while. At some point I told a person in our legal department to not bother paying the maintenance fees on that patent because it did not seem to bring Xerox any value. But it turned out that a competitor had approached us on this patent. For some reason we did not work out a licensing agreement. As a result, this competitor didn't fully implement the feature that they desired. Also it took quite a while for them to bring their scaled-down version of the feature to market. So, our patent seems to have blocked their use of a technology and might have resulted in longer development to work around our patent.
From a public policy point of view, I agree with everything except the last point. I take defensive patenting as the dark side of the process -- in order to spur innovation (by providing monopoly incentives) we have to give someone the right to throttle innovation (by granting that monopoly).
An interesting system.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at October 23, 2007 10:00 AM
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