Got an idea? IBM wants to hear it. Its latest venture, an 'innovation centre' in Damastown, West Dublin wants to take very early stage start-ups and college projects and try to match them up with venture capital money.
A little known fact about the company is that it has more patents acepted than any other company in the world: about 3,000 a year. That's at least 50 times the number of patents accepted by the entire Irish university sector. Read this story for how dismal our patent filing record is in Irish academia.
Patents -- at least in software -- are *not* a good thing. The fact that IBM has a corporate strategy built around heavy patenting is pretty atrocious for the software-development economy in general (unless you're employed by IBM, of course).
If you take a look at http://taint.org/tag/ibm , over the years I have pointed to several cases where it appears IBM employees applied for, and were granted, software patents on trivial software ideas, or ideas that were invented elsewhere; the patenting system simply doesn't work as a whole where software is concerned, and should not be encouraged.
Posted by: Justin Mason | July 13, 2007 at 02:59 PM
Interesting point.
Still, why are our universities so lax at patenting... anything?
Posted by: Adrian | July 13, 2007 at 04:28 PM