A Quote by Eric Maskin
In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.
Related Quotes
The days are over when technology can be advanced in laboratories by individual scientists alone. Now you need an army of lawyers to negotiate the hazardous terrain of interlocking patents. Unless we find a solution to the problem of interlocking patents, the patent system may actually impede the very innovation it was designed to encourage.
Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.
Relative to the taxi industry, Uber is a sustaining innovation; that is, it makes customers' lives better. Uber targeted mainstream markets with a better service for existing customers, and it succeeded in serving them better than the incumbents.
Specifically, in the software industry, progress is highly sequential: progress is typically made through a large number of small steps, each building on the previous ones.
Sometimes in international politics, the better part of wisdom is to defer dangers rather than try to eliminate them altogether instantly.
Our focus is to see that we are growing faster than the industry and, whichever product we launch, we do better than competition. We try and manage our operations better than competition. Essentially, we try to be better than what we were the previous year.
Like patents - which also seek to protect the little guy - unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition, and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole.
When government programs aren't working, those on the Left tend to support more funding, while those on the Right want to scrap them altogether. It is better to ask whether the problem is complexity and poor design. We can solve those problems - sometimes without spending a penny.
If you look across the economy, if you have multiple players in an industry, you have more customization, more innovation, greater choice for consumers. The more you have consolidation, the less likely you are to invest in innovation. It becomes all about driving down cost and mass production. And that's not good for innovation in an industry.
In San Diego, our local innovation economy is a thriving industry employing thousands of highly skilled workers.
I think, writing-wise, I am probably more of a quilter than a weaver because I just get a little scrap here and a little scrap there and sew them together.
The beauty industry is always led by innovation. When you think about over the past three or four years, some of the best innovation in our industry has come from Korea.
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.
When women gain access to higher education and then suddenly start doing better at it than the men, that can really throw the prevailing social order out of balance. That's exactly what's happened in South Korea, which is a highly patriarchal society. They started educating women, and then they were no longer the women that society wants them to be. That caused a real cultural crisis.
If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.
Part of what the food industry does with public relations, just like the chemical industry or the oil industry, is to try to erase their fingerprints from their messaging. So when consumers hear about a recent effort like the "food dialogues" put on by a group called the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, do they know necessarily that these "dialogues" are being funded by companies like Monsanto, a large chemical company and the controller of most of the patents on genetically modified seeds? No, they don't.
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