Former Intel CEO Andy Grove Wants Struggling Industries To Stop Slacking

lousyd writes "Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and current instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: 'You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger.'"

Comments

use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

A "use em or lose'm" rule would be good for fixing the patent troll problem, but it would do nothing to prevent software companies from attacking free software or from ruining standards.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[cavehobbit]

I have been thinking lately, (don't let that scare you), that instead of the patent system granting exclusive rights, it should grant exclusive royalties.

In other words, it becomes a registration system that grantees payment of royalties to inventors for a specific period of time, paid by anyone that wants to use a patent.

So a patent holder can not restrict use of an invention. this allows others to use it as a base for further invention and innovation. It also removes, to a big extent, any reason for companies to fight patent awards, or try to steal or use patents without paying, which might lower the number of lawsuits, etc. Why risk paying lawyers when you can just use it cheaply and legally?.

I am not certain how to determine the royalty rate though. Could an auction system work? Or maybe a percentage of the cost to manufacture, which would be harder to fudge than percentage of profit?

One reform does need to be made, similar to what the parent mentions: You should not be able to file a patent application for anything that is already being produced and marketed by anyone, including yourself. If you forget to file and it is sold or produced before the patent application is filed, well, you screwed up. It should automatically be in the public domain, regardless of what ever kind of excuses or prior evidence you can mock up.

The world has changed since the 18th century when the basis for the U.S. patent system was formed. (I dunno about other systems). It is far easier to keep track of what people are making and selling in distant places than it was 300 years ago, and easier to assess royalties, etc. There seems to no longer need to be a simple ban on anyone else using a patent.

Yeah, lots of details lef tout, and probably lots of holes, and a bunch of new problems different than the current ones. But would it be an improvement over the current system? Maybe you patent gurus here can comment.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[dangitman]

I dunno, government funding of private enterprise has worked pretty spectacularly in the past. For example; the railroad system, The New Deal, WWII spending, interstate highways, aerospace technology, the Apollo missions, ARPANET, etc. And those are only a few examples from the US, ignoring other countries' initiatives.

Of course, there are plenty of spectacular failures too, but that's true of any human endeavor. But like I said, this is just speculation. Would we have had the internet at the time we did without government funding?

healthcare

[mc moss]

"Another business he believes to be ripe for disruption is health care. He complains that the industry seems to innovate much too slowly. The lack of proper electronic medical records and smart âoeclinical decision systemsâ bothers him, as does the slow-moving, bureaucratic nature of clinical trials. He thinks pharmaceutical firms should study the fast âoeknowledge turnsâ achieved by chipmakers, so that the cycles of learning and innovation are accelerated."

I don't think this guy understands how the healthcare industry works. We can implement a change with electronic medical records but when it comes to clinical trials and drug testing, it is not just bureaucracy that slows it down. The very nature of using human subjects as opposed to electronic devices means doing long and thorough testing, and we still don't have a complete picture of how everything fits together in the human body.

Re:No thanks

[maxume]

The hardest part about long term waste storage is getting people to give it as little thought as they give the millions of tons of material pumped into the atmosphere by coal power plants (and it is becoming clear that they actually put more radiation into the environment than nuclear, so it isn't just a matter of the potential problems associated with the CO2).

The idea of creating institutions that need to stand for thousands of years is a little scary, but I'm a lot more scared of turning off the lights.