Using patent-free zones for open innovation
Excerpted from an important article on technology transfer strategies by Vivek Wadhwa (in TechCrunch):
“Most countries outside the U.S. and Europe lie in a Patent-Free Zone—where companies have not filed patents because they believe there is no market for their goods. So this intellectual property is available to anyone in those nations who can find a use for it.
Take the iPhone as an example: it has over 1000 patents; yet Apple does not apply for patent protection in countries like Peru, Ghana, or Ecuador, or, for that matter, in most of the developing world. So entrepreneurs could use these patent filings to gain information to make an iPhone-like device that solves the unique problems of these countries. Apple has so far received 3287 U.S.-issued patents and has 1767 applications pending: a total of 5054 (for all of its products). Yet it has filed for only about 300 patents in China and has been issued 19. In India, it has filed only 38 patent applications and has received four patents. In Mexico it has filed for 109 and received 59 patents. So even India, China, and Mexico are wide-open fields.
Now consider diabetes technology. At the end of 2009, there were more than 12,070 patents issued or pending in the U.S. In Jordan there were only 36, and none were filed in most of Africa. Big pharma considers these markets either too small or too poor; it also hasn’t produced affordable drugs for the millions of desperate people who are increasingly suffering from disease in Africa and the developing world. But there is nothing stopping entrepreneurs from completing these tasks. The blueprints are readily available in the U.S. patent database.
iNan Glasgow, a North Carolina–based patent attorney and CEO of NeoPatents, has been researching the global patent system and developing technologies to explore and map the patent databases. She found that only 5–10% of patents that are filed in the U.S. are actually used to provide commercial value. The rest go to waste.
Glasgow also found that most U.S. companies have been ignoring emerging markets and not filing any patents there.
She noted a strong correlation: the richer the country, the greater the number of patents. This means that the wealth of the developed world’s intellectual property is freely available for use in the emerging regions, where patents are not filed. Glasgow called this the Patent-Free Zone—which covers most of the world, except for the U.S. and Western Europe. BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) have only recently seen increases in patent filings—so all the patents filed in the U.S. over the past few decades are still within the free zone.”
