One day while sitting in my office, sorting through an unintelligible set of rejections crafted by a patent examiner bent on making sure that my client would never receive his patent, I decided that I’d had enough of being a patent attorney. “Nothing gets patented these days,” I grumbled. It was true. The allowance rate for software patent applications had plummeted to an all-time low of 12%. Even worse, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a groundbreaking invention come across my desk. Needing to vent, I wandered down the hall, asking my colleagues to cough up the latest really good idea to venture into our law firm. Try as they might, nobody seemed to be able to recollect any recent ingenious inventions.
Frustrated, I went home and started digging. It didn’t take long for me to discover that today Americans invent less than half of what they did 150 years ago. That was shocking.
I wanted to know why. And so I started on a quest. As I began reading about the great inventors of the nineteenth century and their momentous patent battles, the reason for America’s lackluster performance with innovation immediately became apparent. And it had a lot to do with the demise of our patent system. Out of that experience came Why Has America Stopped Inventing?
Along my journey, I was fortunate enough to meet Jillian Manus who soon became my literary agent. With the help of Penny Nelson, our little team came up with a way to tell this story—one that I hope will convince both America and Congress that life in America could be vastly different … if we really began to invent.