Is Defensive Publishing Appropriate for Small Businesses?

IBM has announced its plans to expand "defensive publishing" rather than patenting as a means to protect its intellectual property. A patent prevents others from practicing the specifics that are covered by the patent, but opens up a Pandora's box of potential work-arounds and litigation. Defensive Publishing is in essence placing IP into the public domain, rendering it thereby unpatentable by anyone, even the inventor.

Since public domain knowledge can be cited as prior art against patent applications, the onus would rest on any subsequent inventor to prove novelty beyond whatever is covered by the defensive publishing. Such an approach would allow IBM or anyone else to practice their art, to use the IP that has been published, making it more difficult for others to restrict that practice by means of a patent.

I have considered this an approach, easier and cheaper than preparing and submitting patent applications, then waiting the 2, 3, 5 years it takes to hear whether it's been approved or denied. The fear for a small business is that while a company like IBM has name recognition and a reputation to rest on, a small little-known quantity like my firm may easily be swallowed up. Were I to engage in defensive publishing, it would protect the ideas in preventing others from restricting my ability to practice them. But it might ring the death knoll of my company.

The fear is that as soon as those ideas become valuable, a large company with a top-notch marketing team, a long-standing reputation and credibility might simply scoop up the ideas, rebrand them, and put me out of business. It's a tough call, a very tough call. Because in the heart of, I'm a researcher. Far worse than going out of business would be for the ideas to never see the light of application.

But am I ready to prepay my company's cemetary plot, in hopes that we won't need to use it any time soon?

Harry Reid: Remiss of Duty

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid circumvents the efforts of the leaders of the Finance Committee to strip the current Jobs bill of Small Business provisions. Just who does the leadership in Washington think will create jobs in this country?

Contact your Senator to do something about it!

Is China's Growth Unsustainable?

Of course, all things good and bad come to an end. The Economist's Robin Bew is projecting an 8%+ growth rate for China's economy in 2010. But a little talked about statistic may soon end China's hubris. As The Economist reported back in December, the year 2010 will likely mark a major milestone in China's demographics.

Largely a result of China's one-child policy, the percentage of the population dependent on others (mostly the elderly and the young) will begin to rise for the first time in decades. Over the coming years, as fewer and fewer active workers support greater numbers of pensioners, we will see China's economy plateau and then shrink. I wonder what the ramifications of this demographic shift will be on governance? Only time will tell.

Inside Boxes

In an article ostensibly lamenting the collateral impact of increased security for America's borders, the following sentence appears:

Among postdoctoral students doing top-level reasearch, 60% are foreign-born.

Putting aside the implication that native-born doctoral students are somehow subpar, I wonder at the worldview that might make sense of such a statistic. Just what could "top-level research" possibly mean objectively? By what stretch of the imagination might we constrain cutting-edge research into manageable gradations, such that some students' research could be deemed top-level, mid-level, low-level, remedial?

It would seem that such a worldview might in part be to blame for what Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has described as a broken innovation ecosystem. If innovation is stifled in America today, a large part of the blame rests in the assumption that the value of research can be known in advance, that such value can be assigned on the basis of what is already known, rather than on the basis of what is yet to be discovered.

At the risk of repeating myself, it is to support and sustain the discover of new innovations that there is such a need in the economy for seed funding, small pots of money to sustain a spare few researchers testing the mettle of their ideas, and driving the successful attempts to market. The Small Business Innovation Research program (SBIR) is one of the few sources for such seed funding, and just now it's being held hostage to the whims of the House Small Business Committee, in particular the committee's Chair, Nydia Velázquez, and Ranking Member Sam Graves. Their maneuvering has kept the SBIR program from reauthorization for two years now, doling out so far six short-term continuing resolutions. Whatever their motivation, support for innovation and small businesses is not among them!