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limitare sistema dei brevetti. Trovare delle alternative come per esempio i premi.
Pagare meglio gli insegnanti e in cambio creare competizione e flessibilità nella scuola.
Meno gente all'università. Disincentivare le facoltà umanistiche e incentivare le scuole professionali.
Incoraggiare l'emigrazione di soggetti scolarizzati.
Meno spesa sociale e più spese di ricerca.
Meno regole specie sul rischio da innovazione.
Globalizzazione. Il motto deve essere un'idea, un mondo, un mercato.
Il nostro mondo ha molte sfide davanti. Occorrono molte soluzioni. L'innovazione e la soluzione universale.
I topi sono strumenti scientifici fondamentale per la ricerca poiché condividono il 95% del loro genoma con l'uomo.
Jackson laboratory nel Maine è un deposito titoli di cui si servono da tutti i centri di ricerca del mondo
Ci sono topi di tutti i tipi, Topi ciechi, topi sordi, topi al cancro e anche topi con deficit di attenzione. Si può ordinare di tutto.
Nel 1988 Harvard e la DuPont brevettano un nuovo tipo di topo l' onco topo. Il primo animale brevettato.
La ricerca sul cancro dipendeva molto dal oncotopo Ma qualsiasi ricercatore doveva pagare Harvard per poter mettersi all'Opera e rendere la sua ricerca disponibile alla dupont.
Dopo che il brevetto di Harvard aumentato la ricerca nel settore aumento del 50%.
Morale. Il prefetto non è uno strumento adeguato quando lo si applica agli strumenti di ricerca. E nemmeno quando lo si applica i settori dove l'innovazione cumulativa ovvero avviene perlopiù su innovazione precedenti.
La abolizione di un brevetto porta ad una perdita per l'azienda brevettante che però guadagna la possibilità di accedere ad altri brevetti ora disponibili
Isaac Newton ha detto di poter guardare lontano perché era sulle spalle di giganti, e se avesse dovuto pagare per stare lì ci sarebbe salito ugualmente?
Looking at the flood of students on college and university campuses, the education stagnation isn’t obvious.65 Enrollment is at an all-time high, and a greater percentage of high school graduates than ever will attend college.66 Look below the surface, however, and the stagnation remains.
Only 35 percent of students in a four-year degree program will graduate within four years, and less than 60 percent will graduate within six years.
A college degree does pay for most people. College graduates earn about double what high school graduates earn, and high school graduates earn significantly more than dropouts… In 2010, the unemployment rate among high school dropouts was close to 15 percent; it was about 5 percent for college graduates. More education is even associated with better life satisfaction, lower divorce rates and less criminality,…
College has been oversold, and in the process the amount of education actually going on in college has declined as colleges have dumbed down classes and inflated grades to accommodate students who would be better off in apprentice and on-the-job training programs. As the number of students attending college has grown, the number of workers with university education but high school jobs has increased. Baggage porters and bellhops don’t need college degrees, but in 2008 17.4 percent of them had at least a bachelor’s degree and 45 percent had some college education.
More than half of the college graduates in the humanities end up in jobs that do not require a college degree. Not surprisingly, these graduates do not get a big “college bonus.”
It may seem odd that at the same time that the United States is failing to get people through high school, it is also pushing too many students into college. But let’s compare the situation with Germany’s. As we said earlier, 97 percent of German students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college. In the United States we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college, almost twice as many as in Germany.73 So are German students undereducated? Not at all… It’s not just Germany that uses apprenticeship and training programs. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland between 40 to 70 percent of students opt for an educational program that combines classroom and workplace learning….
The U.S. has paved a single road to knowledge, the road through the classroom. “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years,” we tell the students,
American students are also not studying the fields with the greatest potential for increasing economic growth. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. Not bad, but here is the surprise: We graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! In comparison, the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts in 2009 — more than double the number of 25 years ago! Figure three shows some of the relevant data. Few fields have been as revolutionized in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance? The U.S. graduated just 5,036 chemical engineers in 2009, no more than we did 25 years ago. In electrical engineering there were 11,619 graduates in 2009, about half the number of 25 years ago. In mathematics and statistics there were 15,496 graduates in 2009, slightly more than the 15,009 graduates of 1985. In comparison, the U.S. graduated just under 40,000 students in psychology 25 years ago but nearly 95,000 today. Perhaps most oddly, the number of students in journalism (!) and communications has nearly doubled in 25 years, rising to 83,109 graduates in 2009. Ask your bellhop for more details. Bear in mind that over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50% so the number of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics has stagnated even as the total number of students has increased. Figure Three: Math and Science Degrees have Stagnated… There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields are less likely to find work in their field than graduates in computer science, microbiology and chemical engineering.
Economic growth is not a magic totem to which all else must bow, but it is the primary reason we subsidize higher education. The wage gains for college graduates go to the graduates — that’s reason enough for students to pursue a college education. We add subsidies on top of the higher wages because we believe that education has positive spillovers, benefits that flow to society. The biggest positive spillover is the increase in innovation… an argument can be made for subsidizing students in fields with potentially large spillovers, such as microbiology, chemical engineering, nuclear physics and computer science. There is little justification for subsidizing sociology, dance and English majors….
The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore began to rise in 1296. From father to son, to son again, the architects, stonemasons and artists of Florence labored with love and devotion to produce the greatest cathedral the world had ever known.
Unsure of how to proceed, the Arte della Lana, the guild of wool merchants who sponsored the cathedral, announced a prize: 200 florins and the commission would go to the best proposal to build the dome.1 Many entries were received, but the guild settled on the plan of Filippo Brunelleschi. The brilliant Brunelleschi had to invent new tools and techniques, but he proved up to the task and the dome was completed in 1436. For nearly 450 years it remained the largest in the world.
in 1474 nearby Venice passed the world’s first general patent law.
Florence provided a free public education in reading, writing and arithmetic. Private schools and tutors, for both children and adults, were also unusually common.4 As a result, literacy rates were high as was commercial numeracy.
The Florentines were obsessed with innovation because they lived by their wits. Florence had few natural resources. The wool merchants, for example, imported wool from England and alum and dyes from Turkey, India and the Middle East. Combining this raw material with sophisticated technology, they produced rich textiles that they exported around the world.
Competition in world markets meant that the Florentines had to innovate to prosper, but world markets also gave them the means to prosper.
Trade also benefited the Florentines by bringing them into contact with the world’s best ideas. Islamic artistry in silk, ceramics and metal inspired the Florentines, as did unmatched Chinese porcelain.
Thus, in Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance, we see five factors propelling that city’s innovation: patents, prizes, education, global markets, and cosmopolitanism, an openness to ideas from around the world.
the early 21st century has not been kind to the United States… Most significantly, productivity growth, our best measure of innovation, fell dramatically in the United States in the post-1973 era and has not yet picked up again. The United States needs to innovate to thrive..
at the level of government, the innovation nation competes with the warfare and welfare state.
Together the warfare and welfare states, counting only the big four of defense, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, eat up $2.2 trillion, or nearly two-thirds of the U.S. federal budget. In contrast the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research, spends $31 billion annually, and the National Science Foundation spends about $7 billion
The point is not simply that the U.S. should spend more money but that a state with these kinds of budget priorities does not have innovation at the center of its vision. If innovation is not central to the vision, then it is inevitably given short shrift.
How would the innovative state approach the issue of health care? From an innovation perspective two facts about health care are of great importance. First, a huge amount of health care spending is wasted. A strong consensus exists on this point from health care researchers all along the political spectrum.86 More money will get you a much bigger house, but once you have basic health insurance more money won’t get you much better health care. Should Bill Gates get prostate cancer, his billions will get him a private room and a personal physician, but they won’t do much to extend his lifespan beyond that of a middle-class man with the same disease. But when you are dying, you don’t have much reason not to waste resources on health care, especially if they are someone else’s resources, so if not constrained you will willingly spend a lot to get little or nothing… The second fact is that although spending more on health care now doesn’t get you much, spending more on health care research gets you a lot.
Looking at the future, if medical research could reduce cancer mortality by just 10 percent, it would be worth $5 trillion to U.S. citizens (and even more taking into account the rest of the world). The net gain would be especially large if we could reduce cancer mortality with new drugs, which are typically cheap to make once discovered.
Regulation is another area in which we have failed to put innovation at the center of our thinking. There are good regulations and bad regulations and lots of debate over which is which… even if each regulation is good, the net effect of all the regulations combined may be bad….
Building in the United States today, for example, requires navigating a thicket of environmental, zoning and aesthetic regulations that vary not only state by state but also county by county. If building a house is difficult, try building an airport. Passenger travel has more than tripled since deregulation in 1978, but in that time only one major new airport has been built, namely, Denver’s. That airport is now the fourth busiest in the world. Indeed the top seven busiest airports are all in the United States, not so much because we are big but because without new construction we are forced to overcrowd our existing infrastructure.89 The result is delays and inefficiency. Meanwhile, China is building 50 to 100 new airports over the next 10 years.
The U.S. Department of Energy, for example, estimates that small and environmentally friendly hydro-electric projects could generate at least 30,000 MWs of power annually. That’s equivalent to the generating capacity of about 30 nuclear power plants. Moreover, since 97% of U.S. dams are generating zero power today, these projects would not require building any new dams. So what’s the problem? The problem is that building even a small hydro-electric project requires the approval of numerous agencies,
Our ancestors were bold and industrious—they built a significant portion of our energy and road infrastructure more than half a century ago. It would be almost impossible to build the system today. Unfortunately, we cannot rely on the infrastructure of our past to travel to our future.
Moreover, few people lobby for innovation because almost by definition, innovation creates present losers and future winners and the present losers are by far the more politically powerful. Innovation has few champions.
Isaac Newton disse che aveva potuto vedere lontano grazie al fatto di stare “sulle spalle di giganti”. Ho l’ impressione che avrebbe potuto vedere ben poco se fosse stato costretto a pagare questo privilegio..
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction
himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his
taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another
over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of
man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have
been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature,
when she made them ... like the air in which we
breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable
of confinement or exclusive appropriationThomas Jefferson
… Thus, in Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance, we see five factors propelling that city's innovation: patents, prizes, education, global markets, and cosmopolitanism, an openness to ideas from around the world…
After hundreds of years of experience, there is surprisingly little evidence that patents actually do promote the progress of science and the useful arts…
roses are a good test for the power of patents because, whether they are patented or not, roses are registered so we have good data on rose innovation as well as on rose patents.9 In fact, a majority of new roses created between 1930 and 1970 — 84 percent in total — were never patented.10 Thus, most rose innovation is not due to patents, and even without patents we would have plenty of new roses…
Defensive patenting, as this practice is called, is basically a waste. It's a prisoner's dilemma in which two (or more) firms spend resources patenting only in order to trade patent rights with each other — the same outcome that would happen under a system of weaker patent rights.
Rather than increase innovation, however, firms with lots of patents seemed to decrease research and development.13 To understand why this might occur, imagine an industry where patents are weak and innovation is rapid, so firms must innovate just to survive. In this kind of environment, firms will not hesitate to introduce technologies even if the new technologies make their own previous technologies redundant. Firms innovate because they know that if they don't, someone else will. In this kind of industry, instead of stimulating innovation strong patents may create a "resting on laurels" effect. A firm with strong patents may reduce innovation, secure in the knowledge that patents protect it.
Patents have a better track record for generating innovative pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical innovation is expensive; it costs about $1 billion to research and develop the average new drug.18 The costs of imitating a new drug, however, are very low. A billion dollars for the first pill, 50 cents for the second. As a result, it's not surprising that the managers of pharmaceutical firms — unlike those in almost all other industries — report that patent protection is important for innovation.
Thomas Keller has been called the best chef in America. His restaurant, the French Laundry, is regularly listed among the world's finest. There are only 14 tables so it's nearly impossible to get a seat, and if you do get a seat, the prices are high. But why bother? In The French Laundry Cookbook Keller presents his exact recipes. Stay at home, follow the recipe, save yourself the time and trouble of traveling to Napa, and you can still enjoy a meal every bit as good as at the French Laundry. Convinced? I hope not. Imitation is not as easy as it appears even with an exact recipe. What is true about recipes and the French Laundry is also true about innovation in general.
In reality, the majority of patent cases do not involve copying but independent invention.23 In the paradigmatic patent case the alleged infringer not only doesn't copy the patented idea, the alleged infringer doesn't even know that a patent on the idea exists. Independent invention is common. Well-known cases
include Newton and Leibniz with the calculus and Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray and Johann Philipp Reis with the telephone. We think that Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler worked together to produce the gasoline-powered
automobile, but they never met. Their invention was simultaneous (Daimler-Benz became a company only years later). If independent invention i the norm for worldclass innovations, is it any surprise that independent invention is the norm for more ordinary innovation?
In addition to often being unnecessary, patents can reduce innovation. In many industries, innovation is a
cumulative process with new innovations building on older innovations. The problem is that under a strong patent
regime, old innovators can block new competitors. Instead of promoting innovation, patents have become a way to veto innovation. In the software, semiconductor and biotech sectors, for example, a new product can require the use of hundreds or even thousands of previous patents, giving each patent owner veto-power over innovation…
In 2011 Apple, HTC, RIM, Nokia and Google were all suing one another in various combinations over patent rights to smartphone technology… To protect themselves from thousands of potential veto threats, big firms like Google, Microsoft and Apple have gone on a patent buying spree, paying billions for patent arsenals. Firms aren't buying the arsenals to gain access to new technology. They are buying old patents so that they can threaten to counter-sue any firm trying to veto their innovation…
Small firms are often the source of radical innovation, the type of innovation that threatens big firms, so the rise of the patent arsenal could decrease truly important innovations.
What the tale of the OncoMouse tells us is that patents in research tools and fields with cumulative innovation can be much costlier than patents for consumer products. A patent on a new toaster, a new rose or even a new pharmaceutical will reduce the consumption of these products, but a patent on a new mouse reduces new ideas.
Innovators need time to recoup their sunk costs, but why should every useful, non-obvious and novel idea be granted a 20-year patent? Maximizing innovation requires treating different industries differently.
Edison famously said "genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."31 A patent system should reward the 99 percent perspiration, not the 1 percent inspiration. In inventing the light bulb, for example, Edison laboriously experimented with some 6,000 possible materials for the filament before hitting upon bamboo. If Edison were to patent the light bulb today, he would not need to go to such lengths. Instead, Edison could patent the use of an "electrical resistor for the production of electromagnetic radiation," a patent that would have covered oven elements as well as light bulbs… Broad claims reduce the incentives of future inventors to invest the sunk costs that are necessary to create actual working products. What has happened in recent decades is that the patent court has allowed much broader claims, and just as the 1895 Supreme Court described, this has created injustice and discouraged innovation…
On April 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne rocketed more than 100 kilometers into space, launching private space exploration into the 21st century and winning Burt Rutan and his team the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. After falling into disuse in the 20th century, prizes have seen a resurgence in the 21st…
The major vice of a prize fund is that it replaces a decentralized process for rewarding innovation with a political process. Under patents, many thousands of medical consumers decide which products to buy or not buy, generating a flow of payments that in sum total rewards producers for medical innovation. No one person
or group is in charge of deciding which pharmaceuticals to reward or by how much to reward them. In contrast, under a prize fund both the size of the innovation fund and how it is divided became political decisions… The Medical Innovation Prize Fund, as a mandatory replacement for patents, has two problems: It's a) difficult to estimate the true value of a patent and b) difficult to avoid politicization of the reward process…
The economist Michael Kremer has made a clever proposal that avoids both of these problems.44 Kremer suggests that patents be auctioned, much like electromagnetic spectrum bands or timber licenses are auctioned today. In an open auction with plenty of bidders, the winning bid will be a good estimate of the true value of the patent. In Kremer's proposal, after holding the auction the government will then roll, say, a 10-sided die. Nine times out of 10 the patent would not be sold to the high bidder but to the government at the auction price plus a markup.
Productivity means working smarter, getting more from the same inputs of labor and capital. From 1947 to about 1973 productivity increased rapidly; we were working smarter and getting the benefits in the post-WWII boom. Beginning around 1973, however, productivity grew more slowly and more of our economic growth came from working harder; for example, from increasing the share of women in the workforce. Nothing wrong with hard work, but if productivity had continued to grow along the 1947-1973 trend then wages today would be more than 50% higher than they are now. In terms of innovation, if productivity had continued to grow along the 1947-1973 trend then we would be living today in the world of 2076 instead of the world of 2011. The post-1973 period has been called the Great Stagnation…
College has been oversold, and in the process the amount of education actually going on in college has declined as colleges have dumbed down classes and inflated grades to accommodate students who would be better off in apprentice and on-the-job training programs. As the number of students attending college has grown, the number of workers with university education but high school jobs has increased. Baggage porters and bellhops don't need college degrees, but in 2008 17.4 percent of them had at least a bachelor's degree and 45 percent had some college education… More than half of the college graduates in the humanities end up in jobs that do not require a college degree. Not surprisingly, these graduates do not get a big "college bonus."…
It may seem odd that at the same time that the United States is failing to get people through high school, it is also pushing too many students into college. But let's compare the situation with Germany's. As we said earlier, 97 percent of German students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college. In the United States we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college, almost twice as many as in Germany.73 So are German students undereducated? Not at all…
American students are also not studying the fields with the greatest potential for increasing economic growth. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor's degrees in computer and information science. Not bad, but here is the surprise: We graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! In comparison, the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts in 2009 — more than double the number of 25 years ago! Figure three shows some of the relevant data. Few fields have been as revolutionized in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor's degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance? There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields are less likely to
find work in their field than graduates in computer science, microbiology and chemical engineering…
The U.S. policy toward high-skill immigrants is truly bizarre. Annually we allow approximately 120,000 employment visas, which cover people of extraordinary ability, professionals with advanced degrees, and other skilled workers. The number is absurdly low for a country with a workforce of 150 million. As a result, it can be years, even decades, before a high-skilled individual is granted a U.S. visa…
Teachers used to come from the top ranks of their college classes, but today 47 percent of America's teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes…
But at the level of government, the innovation nation competes with the warfare and welfare state
Building in the United States today, for example, requires navigating a thicket of environmental, zoning and aesthetic regulations that vary not only state by state but also county by county. If building a house is difficult, try building an airport. Passenger travel has more than tripled since deregulation in 1978, but in that time only one major new airport has been built, namely, Denver's. That airport is now the fourth busiest in the world. Indeed the top seven busiest airports are all in the United States, not so much because we are big but because without new construction we are forced to overcrowd our existing infrastructure.89 The result is delays and inefficiency. Meanwhile, China is building 50 to 100 new airports over the next 10 years.
Education is stagnating in the United States but booming in China. In 1998, Chinese universities were accepting a million new students a year; today it's closer to 6 million. Needless to say, Chinese students are not majoring in dance and sociology; 41 percent of the undergraduate degrees and 50 percent of the graduate degrees are in science and engineering. There are now more scientists and engineers in China than in the United States.
The United States benefits not just from more idea creators in China, India and the rest of the world but also from more idea consumers. Recall the problem of rare diseases. People with a rare disease are doubly unlucky: They have a disease and only a few people with whom to share the costs of developing a cure. Misery loves company because company can help pay for research and development. More consumers mean a greater willingness to pay for ideas, ideas that benefit the world. Consider, if China and India were as rich as the United States is now, the market for cancer drugs would be 8.3 times as large as it is now. Larger markets mean greater incentives to invest in research and development, and that means more innovation.
