Abstract

The number of patent granted in industrialized countries has dramatically increased in the last twenty years. According to researchers, the surge may be the result of the failure of traditional patent evaluation schemes. As a consequence, the patent surge seems to follow the same path of the financial subprime bubble exploded in 2007-2008, which had also been triggered by the difficulty of assessing the risk associated to investments in a system of increasing complexity. However, the formation of such bubbles may be a recurring phenomenon, rather than a pathological event, in both the invention and the financial markets. Therefore, gradual reforms proposed by governments to put these systems under control are intrinsically doomed to failure.