In yesterday’s post, we discussed some of the suggestions from Henry Nothhaft’s recent book, Great Again, on How to Revitalize our Innovation Engine. These suggestions included the liberation of entrepreneurs and start-ups from start-up killing taxes and regulations, the restoration of the VC engine to an earlier design where it worked well, and ending the indifference to domestic manufacturing. These are all great suggestions, but probably the most important suggestion Henry makes is to:

• Fix the Busted Patent System
  It’s an IP economy and (legitimate) patents are critical for a successful innovation economy, especially since investors (and VCs) want to see IP and protection for that IP before (continued) investing. However, the patent office has a backlog of 1.2B that is growing daily, primarily because, what should be one of the few self-funding agencies is being treated as a petty-cash drawer by the politicians, who have cut 150M in funding this year alone. The patent office needs to be fully funded, needs field offices where patents are filed, needs to modernize, and needs to be able to price with the market (including fast-tracking pricing options).

About the only thing I’d add to Henry’s suggestion list is to:

• Abolish sotware and business process patents
  The EU has it right. Software should not be patentable and business processes have existed since the day after the invention of money. All these types of patents do is clog up the patent system, enable the patent pirates, and stifle innovation as funds that should be spent on innovation get spent on overpriced lawyers instead.

So what does this mean to your Supply Management operation?

It means that if you want to enable long-term success, you should:

• help your company establish an innovation fund
  to fund innovative new start-ups that are working on technologies that could revolutionize your manufacturing or supply chain
• source (some product) domestically
  as not only will this help insure supply if the overseas option(s) suddenly become(s) unavailable (due to political unrest, a shipping disruption, etc.), but it will give you ready access to another source of innovation that will complement your own and support the local economy (which needs to be strong to increase local sales)
• NOT buy from companies that support patent piracy
  if a company is flooding the patent office with software and process patents, don’t buy from them. Period. They’re the reason we have patent pirates, and if they all go out of business, or change their ways to stay in business, things might get better.