Posts from innovation

Dig Deeper

I read a post by my friend Brad Feld this morning that struck me as great advice. Brad says:

I’ve been noticing an increasing amount of what I consider to be noise in the system – lots of drama that has nothing to do with innovation, creating great companies, or doing things that matter. I expect this noise will increase for a while as it always does whenever enthusiasm for startups and entrepreneurship increases. When that happens, I’ve learned that I need to go even deeper into the things I care about.

I've been noticing the same nonsense and I've been trying to put up blinders myself. Brad's advice is to make a list of the thing that interest you and then dig deeper on them. His is at the end of his post.

I am interested in extending the internet/web/mobile disruption we've seen in media to big industries like finance, education, healthcare, energy, etc in order to address the challenging economic and social issues of our time. I'm going to take Brad's advice and dig deeper on these areas. And I want to write more about this stuff and discuss it with all of you here.

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Why We Need An Independent Invention Defense

My partner Brad wrote an impassioned plea for an "Independent Invention Defense" for patent infringement claims. He starts his post with this observation.

Almost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls. Is it possible that one third of the engineering teams in our portfolio unethically misappropriated technology from someone else and then made that the basis of their web services? No! That's not what is happening. Our companies are driven by imaginative and innovative engineering teams that are focused on creating social value by bringing innovative new services to market. Our portfolio companies are being attacked by companies that were not even in the same market, very often by companies they did not even know existed.

We can argue about software patents or patents in general. I'm not a fan. I don't think they encourage innovation in many sectors, maybe most sectors. But I recognize that they play a role in protecting inventors from others blatantly stealing their innovations.

But anyone who has spent a significant time in technology based businesses will understand that two groups working completely independently from each other will often solve a problem similarly. One group is not copying or ripping off the other group. They are simply coming to similar conclusions about how to get something done.

In these cases, it makes no sense to protect one group from the other. Nobody has taken anyone's "intellectual property." Both groups should own their inventions outright without having to license technology from the other.

That's not how it works today and as a result, our portfolio companies and entrepreneurs and startups all over this country are paying a very high tax on innovation. Read Brad's post for more details on the costs of bad patent policy and what we should do about it.

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