Does the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Grant Too Many Bad Patents?: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

Many believe the root cause of the patent system’s dysfunction is that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or Agency) is issuing too many invalid patents that unnecessarily drain consumer welfare. Concerns regarding the Agency’s overgranting tendencies have recently spurred the Supreme Court to take a renewed interest in substantive patent law and have driven Congress to enact the first major patent reform act in over sixty years. Policymakers, however, have been modifying the system in an effort to increase patent quality in the dark. As there exists little to no compelling empirical evidence the PTO is actually overgranting patents, lawmakers are left trying to fix the patent system without even understanding the root causes of the system’s shortcomings. This Article begins to rectify this deficiency, advancing the conversation along two dimensions. First, it provides a novel theoretical source for a granting bias on the part of the Agency, positing that the inability of the PTO to finally reject a patent application may create an incentive for the resource-constrained Agency to allow additional patents. Second, this Article attempts to explore, through a sophisticated natural experiment framework, whether the Agency is in fact acting on this incentive and overgranting patents. Our findings suggest that the PTO is biased toward allowing patents. Moreover, our results suggest the PTO is targeting its overgranting tendencies toward those patents it stands to benefit from the most—that is, those patent applications directed toward technologies that have historically had high repeat-filing rates, such as information, computer, and health-related technologies. Our findings provide policymakers with much-needed evidence that the PTO is indeed overgranting patents. Our results also suggest that the literature has overlooked a substantial source of Agency bias; hence, recent fixes to improve patent quality will not achieve their desired outcome of extinguishing the PTO’s overgranting proclivities

Shaping Inclusive Markets: How Funders and Intermediaries can Help Markets Move toward Greater Economic Inclusion

Positive progress toward worldwide economic inclusion is not only possible, but can also be made more possible. In Shaping Inclusive Markets, we draw lessons from history on how more inclusive markets have been achieved and highlight ways in which funders and intermediaries can strengthen the conditions for change

Facilitating Access of Aids Drugs While Maintaining Strong Patent Protection

The AIDS pandemic has thrust the subject of patent protection into the spotlight, a spotlight that has attracted the attention of broad audience including interested parties from the political, legal, and medical communities. Can the United States\u27 scheme of strong patent protection for pharmaceutical products withstand the increased attention

Stories of Impact from the Social Innovation Fund

The Social Innovation Fund is an initiative of the federal government's Corporation for National and Community Service intended to improve the lives of people in low-income communities. It does so by mobilizing public and private resources to grow promising and innovative community-based solutions that have evidence of compelling impact in three areas of priority need: economic opportunity, healthy futures and youth development.The Social Innovation Fund promotes an approach to giving that includes many of the fundamentals that members of the GEO community helped pioneer and have long advocated for, and the fund is aligned with GEO's own mission to promote grantmaking strategies and practices that contribute to grantee success. GEO, through the Scaling What Works initiative, and the Corporation for National and Community Service collected stories that showcase the work of Social Innovation Fund grantees in their communities. These stories feature individuals and families who have benefited from the programs and services of nonprofits receiving support through the Social Innovation Fund and its private philanthropic partners, and they show the ways in which these high-performing organizations are growing their impact within communities across the nation

A New Era in American Health Care: Realizing the Potential of Reform

Illustrates features of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the beneficiaries of reform, changes to the healthcare system, and implementation challenges and long-term concerns. Includes current data on insurance status and access to care

When Cost-Efficient Technologies Meet Politics: A Case Study of Radical Wireless Network Implementation

Cost efficiency has been a dominant perspective in the traditional IT literature. However, in complex technology and business environment, the widely recognized cost efficient assumption of information technology has been increasingly challenged. Drawing from a case study of wireless network implementation situated in a politically sensitive workplace, this paper provided practice insights for IT managers in today’s networked economy. More specifically, stories experienced in the case study illustrated that despite well-calculated cost efficiency of wireless network infrastructure, the radical implementation process in the case organization encountered enormous challenges and opposition due to the fact that administrators failed to consider various stakeholders’ positions and interests. Eventually, the implementation objectives and outcome were considerably undermined. Implications from this empirical case research reemphasized the significance of understanding political forces situated in any business environment where different stakeholders hold conflicting interests. Lessons learned from the case story further encouraged IT managers and policy makers to better strategize emerging information technology in general and wireless networks in particular as the whole global society and business environment are increasingly facing an emerging wireless world

How management innovation happens

Management innovation — that is, the implementation of new management practices, processes and structures that represent a significant departure from current norms — has over time dramatically transformed the way many functions and activities work in organizations. Many of the practices, processes and structures that we see in modern business organizations were developed during the last 150 years by the creative efforts of management innovators. Those innovators have included well-known names like Alfred P. Sloan and Frederick Taylor, as well as numerous other unheralded individuals and small groups of people who all sought to improve the internal workings of organizations by trying something new

From Outsourcing to Innovation: How Nonprofit/Commercial Media Partnerships Can Help Fill the News Gap

Suggests bolstering collaboration between nonprofit and for-profit media by strengthening practices that prepare nonprofits for partnerships and public policies designed to incentivize innovation. Explores strategic business models and community building

The Parable of the Professor and the Foundation: Lessons in Philanthropic Accountability, Risk, and Impact

The paper uses a case study of a loan guarantee fund of $800,000 provided by the Ford Foundation to the Grameen Bank in 1981 as a framework for offering reflections on current debates within US philanthropy on accountability, support for innovation, risk taking and impact. Ford's loan guarantee fund leveraged commercial bank lending to Grameen Bank. The subsequent high rates of loan repayment by loan recipients convinced commercial bankers of the viability of Muhammad Yunus' model of lending to poor entrepreneurs unable to provide traditional loan collateral. The paper develops the concept of "accountability regimes," and argues that foundations engaged in international poverty reduction are better able, institutionally, to bear risk in support of innovation than multilateral and bilateral aid organizations such as the World Bank and USAID. That said, recent interviews of a small sample of executives whose foundations fund poverty work abroad suggest ambivalent attitudes toward funding innovative and risky projects. This is attributed, in part, to high expectations on the part of foundation boards and top executives that foundation-funded programs show positive, early and measurable impact. The great diversity of the US philanthropic community, and the commitment of many foundations to important charitable activities that are not necessarily inviting of innovation, further explains a more modest investment by US philanthropy in the kind of innovative work that they are uniquely sanctioned to support. Encouraging foundations to be more open to supporting innovative initiatives, the paper next offers three operational principles, drawn mainly from the Grameen case study, which foundations might observe in their poverty reduction initiatives. These are: the strongest ideas are likely to come from individuals and organizations outside of foundations working close to the problems; long-term impact assessments should focus on achievement of administrative and policy reforms in institutions that matter in the lives of poor people and; active and early engagement with governments, the private sector and publicly-funded donors will increase the chances that new ideas, once successfully tested, will bring about systemic change. This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 44. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Funding the Extraordinary: An Evaluation of The Kresge Foundation Arts and Culture Program's Institutional Capitalization Grantmaking

In undertaking an assessment of Kresge's Capitalization Program, NFF applied its own high-level framework to help answer Kresge's primary research questions and assess the progress of each grantee in meeting its stated capital targets. NFF has found that effective capitalization in the nonprofit sector requires attention to three key financial priorities: liquidity, adaptability and durability:1. Liquidity: Does the organization have adequate cash to meet its operating needs?2. Adaptability: Does the organization have flexible funds that allow it to make adjustments as circumstances change?3. Durability: Does the organization have sufficient resources to address the range of needs that it may face in future years?NFF's review of Kresge's grantees sought to assess capitalization by looking for evidence of organizational progress in building liquid funds for immediate operating needs, as well as longer-term balance sheet savings for adaptability and durability. NFF's evaluation of grantees involved a combination of data analysis and interviews