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Hope on the Patent Horizon

June 7th, 2007 · by Tim Minahan · 4 Comments · supply management, supply risk

Just when it seemed patent madness might strangle progess of supply management methods and systems, the Bush Administration has announced plans to overhaul the patent filing and award process.

Just yesterday, Patent Trademark Office Director Jon Dudas urged Congress to approve legislation that would require better information from inventors and allow public scrutiny of patent applications.

A key target of the new rules are curbing patents for process or business methods patents or software that contains “only incremental changes over prior work.”

While I’m not a legal scholar, it would seem that the suggested regs would quiet the frenzy of lawsuits in the supply management sector over patent infringement on seemingly universal business processes, such as online ordering and auction methods. It may also dampen the impact of a recent patent awarded for all lean procurement methods.

More good news: the PTO will pilot the new procedures with an open review of software patents.

One can only hope that this more transparent process will eliminate vague and broad-reaching patents (such as all online negotiation methods) and lead to patent awards that protect true innovation.

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4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 David Bush // Jun 7, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    Great work and knowledge on this topic, Tim. I find this issue as disturbing as it is interesting. The pendulum has swung from stealing, to protecting, to squating/squashing. The latter being as un-American and shameful as the former, frankly.

  • 2 Tim Minahan // Jun 7, 2007 at 5:11 pm

    Thanks, David. This is an issue that should keep us all up at night. As a discipline, strategic supply management is only just emerging from its infancy.Unnecessary (unjustified?) impediments, such as sweeping patents on business (read “best practice”) methods is the quickest way to blast our function back to the dark ages.

    Those naysayers who grumble about protecting competitive advantage should answer me this: why is it that Toyota has been able to gain and maintain its leadership position — even after they trained hundreds of companies in their proprietary business methods? (Heck they even wrote books on the Toyota system.) And they openly acknowledge that many of the building blocks for the Toyota System were based on business methods devised 100 years earlier by Henry Ford. (He wrote a book on it too.)

    Toyota realizes that it’s in no one’s best interest to keep best practice business methods — whether it be managing supply or manging customers — proprietary. When used by multiple companies these practices create a more efficient and effective value chain. And that’s good for everyone.

    What Toyota does realize is that they need to strive to continually be the best at these best business methods. That’s called being a competitor.

  • 3 Charles Dominick, SPSM // Jun 8, 2007 at 8:29 am

    Personally, I share concerns similar to David’s. Putting one’s proprietary secrets into a forum for all to see just seems like it will facilitate copycatting, giving the highest returns to the best copycats and the lowest returns to the true innovators.

  • 4 Supply Excellence » Openness: Good Politics, Good Business // Jun 18, 2007 at 10:18 am

    [...] Powell notes that 46% of all Australian students are foreign citizens — particularly from China. “And Australia puts these students on the fast track for foreign residency and citizenship.Powell’s point on openness applies not only to student and work visas. It is apropos for trade policy. (As well as business methods patent litigation.) In recent weeks, Spend Matters blog master Jason Busch has rightfully raised concern over new policies designed to protect U.S. businesses from foreign competition, particularly from China. (Supply Excellence readers have gotten a fair dose of this rhetoric as well.) [...]

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