Global Innovation Commons receives pre–Copenhagen coverage; European Patent Office official minimizes violation of patent law

Global Innovation Commons receives pre–Copenhagen coverage; European Patent Office official minimizes violation of patent law

November 5, 2009 – Brussels, Belgium –– Innovation policy will be the fulcrum for many climate negotiations at United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen. Negotiators seek to extend existing intellectual property practices to vital issues including climate change technologies. M·CAM has provided the world's most comprehensive interactive archive of climate change technologies which have been opaque to the global market for decades – being brought to international visibility in the Global Innovation Commons (http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org). In a deployment partnership with the World Bank and International Finance Corporation's (IFC) infoDev, M–CAM has made available over $2 trillion of both revenue generating and research and development technologies for public, open-source, use.

In today's cover article in Der Spiegel – Patent Lies: Who Says Saving the Planet Has to Cost a Fortune – M·CAM's work on innovation ethics is highlighted. In addition, a now retired senior officer of the European Patent Office acknowledges, on the record, that the illegal practice of redundant patent filings is merely a "detail." "Sometimes patents are not worth what they claim they are in terms of innovation," Gerard Giroud, the recently retired international affairs director of the European Patent Office, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But it seems to me a detail. Patent offices should grant patents to encourage investment in a particular type of technology – because that investment is what will save the planet."

For the complete article, please download:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,628606,00.html

It is important to realize that every conversation about "innovation" as a key to economic "recovery" centers around the belief that somehow or another, the U.S. and Europe will emerge as the innovators of the next economic cycle. This assumption is unfortunate for a number of reasons. First, it presumes that the past 30 years of education of the world's best engineers, business people, and technologists didn't produce more Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Taiwanese professionals than the total of those from and residing in the U.S. and Europe. Second, it presumes that the past two decades of consumption have been based on innovation. Unfortunately, we have been seeing a growth of consumption - not innovation - in most industrial sectors. Finally, it fails to acknowledge that our conversion ratio of innovation to enterprise is less than 3% in the U.S. and Europe. We are good at building food chains for incumbent acquisition in M&A but we're not good at transformation and adoption of game-changers.

The new will be collaborative, open source, and borderless.

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