Intellectual Property: the winning Mario Kart strategy

Patent searching, filing and policing is rapidly becoming a drag on organizations’ resources and agility. The likes of Apple and Samsung only manage to neutralize each other in epic but ultimately no-value-adding battles, pharmaceutical giants are increasingly pressurized to limit the reach of their patents, all industrial sectors produce patents in great numbers without preventing in the end everyone from copying everyone else. While I appreciate this is a simplistic generalization, I get the feeling that the whole business around patents has reached the point of creating more costs than benefits for innovative companies. The time for a new approach has come: enters Mario Kart.