Edward Jung is one of the co-founders of Intellectual Ventures, one of the largest patent holders in the world. Jung currently serves as chief technology officer at IV, and is responsible for setting strategic technology and new business models for the company.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Jung. The full transcript of our 35-minute conversation appears on IPWatchdog.com. What follows are the highlights of our conversation.
Edward Jung on how many foreign countries a decade ago were trying to imitate the United States, but as the United States has become a less favorable jurisdiction, foreign countries are now attempting to distinguish their laws:
When I started IV and was traveling around the world, we were sort of at the tail end of everybody wanting to replicate the US kind of patent policies, IP policies in general, and now I think what we’re seeing is many regions feel that it can be made into a competitive advantage for them to not replicate the system but differentiate themselves in one form or another, whether it be on – speed of patent issuance, or on the courtroom side with say greater certainty and faster litigation outcomes or, you know, actually determining patent eligibility, analysis, patent trading, et cetera. So I believe we’re seeing much more diversity in the market because of that.
When I asked Jung which jurisdiction currently offers the best patent marketplace, he says the U.S. still has the best marketplace, although the U.S. is losing its competitive edge. He explained:
I actually still think it’s the strongest in the US. I mean, it’s hard to beat 100 years of legacy, as well as, you know, the tremendous R&D and innovation machine that the United States is. You know, that’s just culturally, among other things, we’re optimized to disrupt, we’re optimized to invent, we’re optimized towards science and innovation so that’s still the US’s greatest strength and in a sense that still makes it the best marketplace, particularly I would say from a sourcing side. Certainly the US is starting to lose its competitive edge in terms of, you know, funding innovative startups and being able to create deployments for innovations, particularly in the real economy and so on. And, of course, when we talk about a marketplace, you know, there’s many different parts to the marketplace so you also want to keep an eye on what parts are best where, right?
I asked Jung about whether he thought we needed additional patent reform or whether we should pause and let the reforms already passed play out. I expected that he would want to see a pause, but he said that he was not necessarily against patent reform, but that it depended what was in the patent reform. Jung explained:
It’s so unusual to go through so many generations of patent reform so quickly. Usually things are given a chance to shake out. However, I think this maybe is our own fault as pro strong IP— not a lot of people showed up to the fight, so to speak, and were not vociferous about their positions as the weakened patent group during the last round. And in this round, I think it’s going to be a little bit more of an even game, so if we can get the pendulum to swing back a bit, that might be good. We’ve already seen that the new rules around IPR have some unintended consequences to various key parts of our economy, like healthcare, and that’s probably not a good thing and should be changed.
Tags: Edward Jung, Intellectual Ventures, interview, interviews, IV, patent, patents
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