Grim Outlook for USPTO

Today's Watch Dog Report in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel provides a grim outlook on the state of affairs at USPTO. The article, " Despite efforts to improve, US patent approvals move slower" highlights the impact of long pendencies, budget freezes, attrition and a host of other ills. John Schmid wrote, "...the US wastes at least $6.4 Billion each year in "forgone invention" - legitimate technology ht cannot get licenses and start-ups that cannot get funded because of US Patent Office problems."

The horror stories of patent applications languishing on the floors of examiners offices for years are distressing. When you consider the current political and economic chants about innovation, and research and development; reports that the Chinese want to file a million patent applications by 2015 with a good number of them landing here, an the accelerating pace of the creation of complex technical and scientific documents and no subject matter experts to review all this stuff; PTO seems to be in for a rough ride.

You can read the article at here. Thanks to Greg Aharonian of Internet Patent News Service for passing the report along.

A New Ideas to Market Nexus

Cleveland Clinic and MedStar announced a new collaboration to bring more medical inventions to market. Read the article in yesterday's Washington Post here.

The Post reports that this is one of the first partnerships where a health services system is partnering with the holder of life sciences patents to leverage the health systems clinical experts to commercialize patented inventions.

One of the interesting items in the article is the nexus between adoption of electronic health records and finding more opportunities to reach out to other experts to collaborate. "With improvements in electronic health records, more health systems will be turning to such collaborations to tap into the expertise of other organizations, officials said.'

Calling Alan Gilbert....here's an extension of the collaboration model.

This is good news for inventors, for clinicians, and for patients and an interesting twist on commercialization to cut the time to market for innovations.

Coronado IP and the Power of Concept Searching

“Noscitur a Sociis”

A word is known by the company it keeps.