Patent Law

Best Blog Posts First Quarter from 3 Geeks and a Law Blog

By Les Weinstein, Michael Young, John Leo Wagner, Eric van Ginkel, and Victoria Pynchon

It's quite a list but here's my favorite:  Reality:  the Enemy of Innovation? from The Creative Class, excerpt below.

Almost everything that we think is real is actually a construction of inferences and interpretations that we misinterpret as reality. And unfortunately, the belief that we are directly observing and understanding ‘reality' discourages us from trying to change it. Hence our concept of ‘reality' is the enemy of innovation.

The ‘reality' assertion happens all the time. I recall a fellow board member, Tony M., arguing with me during a board meeting, 'Roger, the reality is that we can't sell this division right now.' In fact, we could (and did) sell the division, but it didn't appear that way to Tony because the things to which he paid attention didn't add up to the possibility of sale.

Tony didn't see his view as a model of reality, but as reality-direct, pure, and clean. That is why he didn't say, 'I don't think we can sell it,' but rather 'the reality is we can't.'

When we see ‘reality,' we act to confirm and reinforce that ‘reality', whether it is real or not. So if we were to conclude that ‘the reality is' that consumers won't pay a premium for quality-for example, they won't pay more than 99 cents for a four-roll package of toilet paper-then we won't even try to provide more quality. Instead we will provide a generic product and spend our resources on price promotions that enable retailers to hit the 99-cent price point.

Read on here.

Our watchword?  The same as Sun Microsystem's CEO Jonathan Schwartz:  "innovate, don't litigate."

Full post as published by IP ADR Blog on May 29, 2009 (boomark / email).