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If the new president wishes to find ways of increasing employment in the USA then there is one area which has been overlooked by this country for the past century as generator of new business. Innovation has been and continues to be the lifeblood of this country and yet an enormous amount of brain power in America is being squandered which could create new technologies, businesses and jobs. Inventors by the train load register new patents every week yet very few see the light of day some because they are impractical or have no commercial application yet there are many promising patents which don't make it to the front line because the inventors don't have the skills or connections to raise funding to develop their brainchild.
A trawl through the USPTO database shows a seemingly never ending list of patents who have not been assigned to a company, a probable indicator that the inventor was unable to find investors or a company to license the invention.
The interesting fact is that the US government has teams of patent examiners who examine all these patent applications yet this vast array of intellectual property simply washes through the US patent office without the government making any attempt to see if the inventors have the wherewithal to develop the patents into commercial products. Imagine if the US patent office were to establish another department which offered a service to assist those patent holders who clearly don't know how to commercialize their invention. A new patent office department which offered a free service to assist patent holders to commercialize their patent through business plan development and introductions to potential business partners would do wonders in creating new businesses and create new jobs. The patent new department, staffed by entrepreneurs, could develop on-line support systems to enable inventors create business plans, arrange conference calls and meetings with business partners and provide attractive loan packages to jump start new businesses based on the inventions.
The proposed new service could be started quickly with a ‘data mining' operation of the tens of thousands of patents in the USPTO to determine which patents granted in say the last 2 years have not been commercialized but have the potential to create real jobs. There is surely an army of retired entrepreneurs and successful business managers who would likely have the skills and interest in staffing a Patent Development department to carry out this data mining and assist inventors commercialize their patents.
The only president to have ever registered a patent is Abraham Lincoln, the very same president who had the vision to use the then recently invented telegraphy system to win the civil war. Well we have another war now in this country and that is the civil war against rising unemployment. What is required now is a president who has the vision to take the vast intellectual capital sitting dormant in the patent office library and put it to use so that it can earn interest through job creation.
Vince Waterson is VP of business development for a telecommunications company in California. He can be contacted at vwaterson@aol.com
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