Opinion piece - Innovation

What is innovation?

The dictionary definition is fairly bland. Dictionary.com defines innovation as "Something new or different introduced: numerous innovations in the high-school curriculum. The act of innovating; introduction of new things or methods." I have no idea which dictionary OS X uses but it defines innovation simply as "a new method, idea, product, etc. : technological innovations designed to save energy."

The OS X dictionary is, I think, slightly more revealing and in line with what people normally understand by innovation. From the Dictionary.com definition, innovation could simply be regarded as newness for newness sake. The example given in the OS X definition – new technological innovations designed to save energy – has an implied additional context of newness with a purpose, of newness with a tangible benefit. This also implies some kind of standard to be met, a bar to be cleared if you like, before something can be thought of as innovative.

There are a lot of differing opinions about where that bar should be set. On the one hand you have the die hard technology geek. Innovation to them is something big and brand new, something that has never been achieved before. A fusion reactor, a flying car, a quantum computer – that kind of thing. Internet forums inhabited by the die hard geeks tend to be full of posts along the line of 'yeah, not bad but wake me up when it does this'. Or this ever popular sequence:

'Company A has released this incredible new technology – wow!'

'Meh – that's just a tweak on what company B was doing years ago – company A is just copying them.'

'Pfff – Company B got all their best ideas from Company C. Besides, real engineers know that Company D did it first and anyway product X by company E is what you really should be using.'

At the other end of the spectrum you get the popular press and marketing hype where every incremental improvement is trumpeted as 'Innovation'. Using the dictionary definition, I suppose it is but that strikes me as sticking to the letter rather than the spirit of said definition. Naturally the die hard geek dismisses this level of innovation as 'marketing' – a catch all dismissal of any product that manages to be far more popular than a competing product, even though it is technologically 'inferior'.

(Yes, this post is full of sweeping generalisations. That's why it's marked as an opinion piece.)

Personally I think it would be a much saner world if we could avoid either of those extremes. It would certainly save a great deal of time, energy, paper, marketing budgets and recycled arguments. Most innovation consists of incremental improvements on a concept, or the repurposing of old concepts, rather than brand new concepts. To quote Ambrose Bierce - “There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.”

Loudly proclaiming the 'innovation' of each and every advance or minor variation on an old theme isn't helpful and simply degrades the word to the point where the bigger advances or genuinely useful reworking of old themes get lost in the noise. On the other hand, dismissing everything that isn't absolutely brand new as not being innovative does a similar disservice to those same advances or reworkings. To my mind, taking an existing but little used product, working out why it's not used and then designing a similar product to overcome those barriers to use, most certainly qualifies as innovation. It might not be a brand new product, it might not be exciting to the purists or technological connoisseurs but it can certainly be innovative.

Another day, another troll

A number of news sites are reporting that Smartphone Technologies (a subsidiary of Acacia Research) have filed a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming infringement of four of their patents. Most of the sites seem to link back to this article at paidContent.org. Details of the actual infringed patents are somewhat sketchy, although US 6,956,562 is reported as one of them.

Acacia is widely regarded as a patent troll, i.e. a company that does not sell any products or services itself and buys patents solely to monetise them through licensing or litigation. The lawsuit was launched in the Texas Eastern District Court - so no surprise there either.

Cue the normal spate of predictable anti-patent commentary. However the paidContent article itself seems a little unclear about what is being infringed and why. From the article:

U.S. Patent No. 6,956,562, for instance, seems to describe the act of tapping an icon in order to instruct the device to perform an action:

According to the method, a graphical feature having a surface area is displayed on a touch-sensitive screen. ..To control software executing on the processor, a user-supplied writing on the surface area is received and the software is controlled responsive to the writing.

To me, this looks more like a method for controlling a smartphone, tablet, PDA etc by handwriting recognition. Not quite the same as tapping an icon.

So lets have a look at the actual patent. Published 18 October 2005 so fairly old and has a priority date of 16 May 2000, which isn't ridiculous either. This doesn't appear to be an ersatz submarine patent with umpteen continuations or continuations in part. Lets check the claims - 66 of them with only two independent claims. Again, not too ridiculous - I've seen far worse. Claim 1 reads:

A method for software control, comprising:
displaying a graphic representing a set of one or more computer functions on a portion of a touch-sensitive screen, wherein the touch-sensitive screen is coupled to at least one processor to detect and interpret contact with the screen; 
detecting an object making a first sequence of one or more contacts that form a first drawing on the portion of the screen; 
in response to detecting the object making the first sequence of one or more contacts that form the first drawing: 
matching the first sequence to a particular action in a set of actions, and performing the particular action; 
detecting an object making a second sequence of one or more contacts to form a second drawing on the portion of the screen; 
in response to detecting the object making the second sequence of one or more contacts to form the second drawing: 
matching the second sequence to a second action in a set of actions related 
to said one or more computer functions, and 
performing the second action; 
wherein the visual appearance of the graphic is the same when the first sequence of contacts is commenced and when the second sequence of contacts is commenced. 


Claim 47 is a claim to a computer controlled by the method of claim 1.


OK, displaying a graphic representing one or more computer functions on a portion of a touch sensitive screen. Yep, that sounds very much like an icon. Making a sequence of one or more contacts to form a first drawing - I'm not sure that this does encompass a simple button tap. You could argue that the claim encompasses a single contact - aka a tap but can a tap be reasonably considered to be a drawing? In my opinion no. However, writing a letter on the screen could be construed as a drawing. As for the one or more contacts - consider the difference between the letters 'o' and 'i'. The first can be drawn with a single contact, the second requires two separate contacts to make the line and the dot.

Furthermore, claim 1 is quite limited (presumably to avoid prior art) in that it stipulates a chain of two commands (both input via drawings as discussed above) and that the the appearance of the icon (or other part of the GUI) remains the same between both commands.

All in all, quite an odd little patent and certainly not a simplistic 'patent for tapping an icon on a smartphone'. Actually this reminds me more of Swype - where words are entered in e.g a text message by performing a gesture across a touchscreen keyboard. Entering a word into a text message could also be regarded as an 'action' in the context of the claim....