David Plouffe Gives Preliminary Response Concerning Obstacles To Innovation

Tony was the first of a bunch of you to send over the news that President Obama's top advisor, David Plouffe, has put up a blog post providing a preliminary overview of what he "heard" via the Ask the Advisor question, which we wrote about last week, concerning "obstacles to innovation." The only indication that responses like mine were read was a brief mention about how some people complained about how the government, and particularly patent policy, got in the way of innovation:

Many respondents felt that too much government regulation stifled businesses and innovators and that the patent process and intellectual property laws are broken.

Unfortunately, rather than listening to why today's patent system is a real and significant problem, it appears that Plouffe is using this to score political points for his boss:

In his State of the Union Address, the President called for a government-wide review of regulations to find and fix those regulations that place unnecessary burdens on businesses. Indeed, in his Budget, the President put forward a set of common sense reforms to our patent system that will make it easier for innovators to move ideas to market and foster growth.

The problem is that his suggestions for patent reform do not fix the system, and in some cases make it much worse. In fact, I pointed to numerous studies and research in my response that explained this.

Plouffe claims he'll have much more on this topic of encouraging innovation, so we'll wait and hope that perhaps the administration will really listen this time, and not just paper over the real problems of the patent system with reform policies that won't help (and might actually make the system worse).

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