It is that time of the year where we all start to look ahead to the new year, perhaps making some New Year resolutions that are sure to last for at least a few days. Over the past several years I write an article titled “Patent Wishes,” and two years ago I contacted a number of my industry contacts to ask them what they wish for moving into the New Year. See Industry Insiders Make Patent Wishes for 2010.

With that in mind I once again contacted some of my friends to get them to go on the record with their patent and innovation related wishes for 2012. I was lucky enough to get a number of very thoughtful responses from individuals with a variety of experiences.

So without further ado, here are the wishes of some industry insiders for 2012.  Please feel free to add your own wishes to the comments, and stay tuned for my annual Patent Wishes article where I write about my own wishes for the year ahead.

Several weeks ago, on December 11, 2011, U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson set out his vision for how the Department of Commerce can best partner with the business community to support President Obama’s jobs agenda.  If the past is any indication of the future, President Obama and it senior team will do whatever they can leading into the new year to jump start the economy and get Americans back to work.

At his speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Commerce Secretary Bryson outlined his top three priorities to help American businesses “build it here and sell it everywhere,” focusing on supporting advanced manufacturing, increasing our exports, and attracting more investment to America from all over the world.  The key to emerging from the Great Recession is, of course, manufacturing.  Manufacturing jobs have left the U.S. in favor of more business friendly climates in other countries, taking with them U.S. jobs and U.S. intellectual property.  But moving into a Presidential election year will government be able to do anything that is at all likely to help?

As you may have seen, IPWatchdog.com has been named to the ABA Blawg 100, which recognizes the top 100 blogs on the Internet written by lawyers for lawyers.  This marks the third year in a row we have been honored by the American Bar Association Journal as a top 100 blog.

Now the voting begins. Last year we were voted the top IP Law blog and greatly appreciate the support we received.  Once again this year we are in the same category — IP Law — as is Professor Dennis Crouch’s widely popular PatentlyO blog.  If you are inclined to vote for us we would once again greatly appreciate your support.

Over the years IPWatchdog.com has continued to try and add additional perspectives from a wide variety of guest contributors, ranging from well respected practicing attorneys and agents to high profile academics to inventors and pro-patent lobbyists. It is hard to imagine providing such depth of analysis on such an array of topics without having truly wonderful guest authors.  So we take this moment to say a very special thank you and to shine the spotlight on them. Each deserve to share in any recognition of IPWatchdog.com.  While I am loathe to single any guests out I would be remiss if I didn’t separately thank both Beth Hutchens (10 contributions) and Eric Guttag (9 contributions)!

Without further ado, here are the guest contributors in alphabetical order, along with their contributions for 2011.

What should you expect from President Obama’s jobs speech tomorrow? Sadly, not much.

The president says that’s the fault of recalcitrant Republicans in Congress. Republicans in Congress say it’s the fault of a president who is hostile to business.

But the real reason we are not putting people back to work three long years into the recession is that Washington is afflicted with a totally-bipartisan cluelessness about how to create jobs.

As I argued in my “Labor Day Message for President Obama” in the Wall Street Journal last weekend, there is a great deal that the president and congress can do to create millions of new jobs quickly, if only they would stop their ideological bickering and instead “focus on a few practical, low-cost measures that we know will create lots of jobs quickly.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce conducted two small business focus groups on April 1, 2011, in Philadelphia, as well as a national survey of small business owners through interviews with 900 businesses April 8 – 12, 2011. The findings from this study make up the inaugural quarterly “Small Business Outlook Survey,” and paint an unfortunately bleak picture of the collective outlook of small businesses moving forward.

Small businesses are the backbone of the nation’s economy and those that are most likely to engage in job creation.  Unfortunately, the small businesses surveyed tell a tale of little or no job creation over the next 1 to 3 years, and in fact suggest there will be more layoffs coming.  The respondents see too much uncertainty in Washington, DC, too many regulations and a number of other matters (i.e., the deficit, debt, health care and taxes) as significant impediments to job creation.  This on the heels of a disappointing jobs report for June 2010, downward revisions of the number of jobs created in April and May, and unemployment rising to 9.2%, this Chamber survey only piles on the continuing terrible news for the economy.  With Congress bickering over the obvious — namely that we simply cannot spend money we don’t have and need to start spending less than we bring in to cut the deficit — it doesn’t seem there is likely to be any good news on the horizon.

Pat Choate and Hank Nothhaft, at the Met Club, June 14, 2011.

I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of Great Again several months before it became available. I have also had the pleasure of getting to know Hank Nothhaft and his co-author David Kline over the past year or so, frequently exchanging e-mails discussing a variety of innovation and patent related issues. It has been exceptionally difficult to keep quiet knowing what Hank and David were writing about, and then reading the nearly finished manuscript. Simply put, everyone in the innovation industry and patent community needs to read Great Again. Every Staffer on Capitol Hill and everyone working in the White House needs to read Great Again. While Members of Congress are no doubt busy with a great many things, they too should read Great Again, but at the very least Members of Congress and those in the Executive Branch, including President Obama, should at a minimum read the Introduction, which is just 12 pages long.

Last week LinkedIn soared to unexpected heights as it debuted as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.  Priced at $45, LinkedIn shares more than doubled by the end of its first day as a public company, spiking close to triple the $45 offering price before sliding back.  On Friday the stock closed over $93, but on Monday the stock opened at $86.45, and at mid-day it was bouncing around slightly north of $85 per share, and by mid-afternoon it started to climb once again toward $92.  See NYSE: LNKD.

It is still early to know whether this is irrational exuberance or whether this is a meaningful event for the companies that follow LinkedIn to IPO.  In all likelihood it is a little of both, namely a meaningful event that demonstrates at least some irrational exuberance.  With the economy and the IPO market having been in the tank for so long a little zeal never hurt anyone, right?  In any event, regardless of what LinkedIn does from here on out the fury of trading and interest suggests that good things are on the horizon for the economy and perhaps for job creation as well.

Sometimes the problems facing our nation truly are difficult to solve. Reducing the country’s out-of-control budget deficit and fixing our broken public schools systems, for example, each took decades to grow into serious threats to America’s future. And each requires more political vision and national unity to resolve than seem to exist right now.

But other problems are not that difficult to solve, if only our leaders would choose to use some common sense. Take job creation, which is supposed to be the Number 1 policy objective in America right now. The mechanics of job creation are hardly a mystery, after all. We know, for example, that all net new job growth in America comes from startup businesses, not Big Business (see research by the Census Bureau and the Kauffman Foundation).   And we also know that the vast majority of these startups need patents to get the funding from investors they need to start hiring people so they can develop their innovative new products and medical treatments for the public (see the Berkeley Patent Survey of Entrepreneurs).

Gene Quinn, at University of New Mexico, April 21, 2011

Patents are indeed the lifeblood of innovation. Of course, without innovation nothing else happens, or matters, but there is definitely a symbiotic relationship between innovation and patents. The innovation that we say we most want is that innovation that is cutting edge, not just an improvement upon what already exists; paradigm shifting innovation or technologies that could be characterized as disruptive in nature. It is with paradigm shifting, disruptive innovation that we see leaps forward. Those leaps forward lead to the formation of new start-up companies and frequently to the birth of entire new industries. It is with this type of highly desirable innovation that we see enormous job growth, which the U.S. economy could use right about now. Unfortunately, this type of innovation does not come cheap.

It appears as if the time has finally arrived for an up or down vote on patent reform in the United States Senate.  It has been widely reported that the full Senate will take up patent reform upon returning from recess this week, and it is now believed by many on the inside that the Senate will take up patent reform on Monday, February 28, 2011, the first day back.  Some are even anticipating that the Senate will vote on patent reform bill S. 23 late in the day on Monday, February 28, 2011.  See Crunch Time: Call Your Senators on Patent Reform.  That would seem exceptionally quick, particularly given the rancorous issues and Amendments still to be presented, but nothing will surprise me.

As we get closer to a vote in the Senate the rhetoric of those for and against patent reform is heating up to a fever pitch.  The big fight, once again, is over first to file, with battle lines drawn that run extremely deep.  Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) is expected to file an Amendment stripping the first to file provisions, which could be supported by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

President Obama delivers his weekly address on Feb. 5, 2011

In his February 5th radio address, President Obama noted that “If we make America the best place to do business, businesses should … set up shop here, and hire our workers, and pay decent wages, and invest in the future of this nation. That’s their obligation.”

I agree. But government has an obligation, too. Is it doing all it can to truly make America the best place to do business?

Consider Evergreen Solar, which until last month was one of America’s largest solar panel makers. On January 14th, it shut down its Massachusetts factory and sent 800 jobs to China. This leaves only Silicon Valley’s Solyndra making solar panels in the U.S., and it just shut down one of its two production facilities.

What appears below is the speech Henry Nothhaft (Tessera President & CEO) gave at the Innovation Alliance conference on January 21, 2010, which is published with his permission. Readers may also find interesting Nothhaft’s recent article Looking for Jobs in All the Wrong Places: Memo to the President, relating to President Obama’s State of the Union Address and published by Harvard Business Review.

Hank Nothhaft addresses the Innovation Alliance Conference, 1-21-2011.

All told, I’ve helped create more than 6000 jobs and return 8 billion dollars to investors. And this work experience has given me first hand insight into a subject that economists are only now beginning to study closely. Namely the surprisingly powerful role that start ups play in job creation and economic growth. Of course, economists have been studying the sources of economic growth for a long time. 50 years ago, Robert Solo discovered to every one’s great shock that virtually all economic growth, or at least 80% of it comes from technological innovation. Not capital inputs or productivity increases or anything else, just technological innovation, the kind of break-through innovation that crates whole new industries and millions of jobs. Like the development of semiconductors, personal computers, software, and the Internet.

Patenting, like politics and religion, tends to bring out the true believer in some people.

Simply mentioning the word “patent” at a technology gathering, for example, is likely to produce an absolutist harangue from someone about why intellectual property is either the single greatest innovation enhancer in human history, or conversely, the most perverse economic evil ever devised by man. For some people, it’s all black and white when it comes to patents.

Even a seemingly-inarguable fact like the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey’s finding that most entrepreneurs find patents helpful in attracting financing for their startups can lead some anti-patent activists to suggest that perhaps entrepreneurs aren’t capable of accurately assessing their own experience with patents and are instead simply the victims of a collective delusion.

Occasionally I come across some news that I wish I had time to write about, and frequently any more I am asked to help spread the word on a variety of topics relating to the intellectual property industry.  With that in mind, what appears below are some random things that many would likely we interested in knowing about.

In this edition of News, Notes & Announcements, patent attorneys asked to participate in an inequitable conduct study, BIO seeks session proposals for 2011 Convention, Huffington Post and other popular press starting to report that patent backlog is costing jobs, the Second Circuit refuses en banc rehearing in reverse patent payments case and PLI sponsoring yours truly on a speaking tour.

On Wednesday, September 8, 2010, the Wall Street Journal published commentary titled Want to Create Jobs? Certainly Don’t Rely on the USPTO, which was an attempted rebuttal of the NY Times op-ed written by Chief Judge Paul Michel and Tessera CEO Hank Nothhaft, which was titled Inventing Our Way Out of Joblessness. I say that it was an attempted rebuttal because simply stated the article was embarrassingly incorrect about virtually everything it stated as fact, and provably so. The fact that the Wall Street Journal published such complete and utter nonsense, which could have been proven to be factually incorrect had anyone even read the study relied upon by the authors, is quite sad.  Those who don’t believe innovation leads to job creation have their heads firmly implanted in the sand and simply must choose to ignore history, which proves otherwise.