In this excerpt from the new book Great Again, author Henry R. Nothhaft illustrates how the dysfunction at the United States Patent and Trademark Office is imperiling not only entrepreneurial inventors, but the economic recovery as a whole and even America's global innovation leadership.

Great AgainSince 1992, Congress has diverted nearly $1 billion in applicant-paid fees already earned by the USPTO to other uses (such as to help pay for the 2010 census), leaving the patent office understaffed, under-resourced, and wholly unable to deal with the threefold increase in patent applications over the last twenty years.

U.S tech companies have been the driving forces behind innovation in America for over two hundred years.

Together IBM and General Electric have filed over 1.5 million patents, 60 times the number filed by the U.S. government.

Abroad there's a similar story. While IBM and GE rank first and third for patents filed, Japanese corporations like Canon, Hitachi and Mitsubishi make up the rest of the top ten.

Coca-Cola is everywhere.

The iconic American brand is recognized instantly around the globe and sold in more than 200 countries. Additionally there are thousands of subsidiary beverages that you might have no idea are owned by Coke.

Despite three CEO changes since 2000, Coke has kept a firm lead in the U.S. carbonated drinks market, with 42.8% market share to Pepsi's 31.1%.

Source: Data from the US Patent and Trademark Office

Download the Excel version of this table here.

Change in Patents by State, 2005-2010

The concept behind CemenTech’s machinery is simple -- rather than mixing a batch of concrete with a short shelf life at a remote location and trucking it into the job site, why not mix the ingredients right on the truck?

That novel concept has led to the Indianola, Iowa, company’s machinery being sold in over 50 countries around the globe.

“We’ve been the innovators, if you will, in our little niche market,” said Gary Ruble, Chairman and CEO of Multi-Tech, Inc., CemenTech’s parent company.

From construction sites in industrialized countries, such as the Autobahn in Germany, to projects in developing nations, such as the Caribbean Islands, CemenTech’s machinery can be found throughout the world.

The company’s idea has produced a long list of advantages compared to a standard cement drum truck, which transports concrete that is pre-mixed to a construction site.

One benefit of using a CemenTech concrete mixer is that the concrete is always fresh and of the best possible quality.

Most ready-mix concrete that is transported via a drum truck begins to rapidly degrade in quality within 45 minutes of it being mixed. Because CemenTech’s mobile cement mixer mixes the concrete components -- sand, stone, Portland cement, and water -- at the point where it will be poured, the concern that a load may break down en route to the construction site is eliminated.

The European Commission has just published its 2011 Innovation Union Competitiveness Report (see IP/11/692). The Report builds on the Innovation Union Scoreboard and includes a factsheet detailing each country’s research and innovation performance. This MEMO explains the context of the Report and gives details of its findings.

Why is this report important? This is the first report providing a comprehensive analysis of recent trends and long-term evolution in research and innovation performance in all 27 EU Member States and six Associated Countries.

The report provides solid facts on which to base European and national policy choices to build efficient research and innovation systems and turn the EU into a true “Innovation Union” (see IP/10/1288)

Public and private stakeholders will also get, in single compendium, valuable insights to design winning innovation strategies within Europe and for the global market.

Pfizer's quest to find a more productive way to discover and advance important new treatments is taking the pharma giant on a journey back to college in Boston. With some of Pfizer's R&D luminaries joining hands with top politicians, the company announced a $100 million, five-year plan to establish a new Center for Therapeutic Innovation in the heart of the thriving biotech hub. Some 50 investigators will be brought in to work in teams with researchers at local universities and hospitals.

Pfizer--which spent $9.4 billion last year on R&D--is one of a group of Big Pharma companies which have far too little to show for their massive budgets. As a result Pfizer has joined Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline and others which have pronounced themselves fed up with the old way of developing a pipeline, declaring a shift toward a new "open ecosystem" in which corporate researchers link up with outside groups--particularly at top research colleges--in search of inspiration and success.

The New York City startup scene is bustling.

Every other day a tired banker leaves Wall Street to start a company. Incubators like DogPatch Labs and General Assembly are housing dozens of entrepreneurs and helping them get off the ground. TechStars NYC applicants jumped from 600 to 1,000 and TechCrunch's Mike Arrington said he's most proud of the NYC 2011 Disrupt startups.

After hitting the incubators, speaking with VCs and entrepreneurs, we selected 25 startups that are hidden gems; they're on track to blow up and become the next big tech titans.

The dirty little secret of business today: there really are no agreed-upon ways of doing business anymore. Every company does everything differently, and you can’t really compare them because there are no controlled experience. So it isn’t a science.

But here are five very old rules that I see successful companies breaking all the time. I thought they’d give you some food for thought - unless you’re already breaking all of these– which I very much doubt.

1. Set working hours

Forget 9 - 5. Try to get rid of face time. All your team should have goals they’re accountable for but when and where they’re achieved really doesn’t matter. Some people work well at night, some early morning, some don’t get up til noon. I’ve always told my employees that, as long as they didn’t mess their co-workers around, I didn’t care what hours they worked. No one let me down.

Long lines at the gas pump weren’t the only product of the twin energy crises of the 1970s. A legislative push toward energy conservation and innovation were also born as a result.

And that’s why one expert believes the skyrocketing price of oil will do the same in 2011.

“History has proven that innovation in the energy industry has almost always been driven by high consumer prices,” said Robert Brands, a veteran corporate executive who now consults with companies worldwide and author of Robert’s Rules of Innovation. “When we had cheap and abundant oil – and low gas prices – during the 1980s, energy exploration and innovation slowed to a halt. We didn’t need it, and we didn’t see an end in sight to the steady stream of oil from the Middle East. So, investors held back funds for new technologies, oil companies stood pat and conservation became a four-letter word.”

Of all the big tech companies competing for engineering talent, Twitter has fared the best while Yahoo is doing the worst.

That's according to statistics released today by TopProspect, which helps companies find technical employees based on peer recommendations.

The company analyzed its 2.5 million user profiles for people who have switched jobs in the last two years, and found that for every one person who left Twitter, the company hired 10.9 more.

Technology nowadays is supposed to be disruptive—in a good way— so let it disrupt your summer vacation. Enrich it, we mean, with these provocative books. Last grades submitted? Last commencement handshake done? Take a little time to find out what's in store next year and after that: Social media might rot students' brains—or create a cognitive surplus that improves society; hackers' pranks have definitely improved aspects of MIT; and Twitter may help repressive regimes more than it aids democracy activists. Also watch a video in which a professor outlines the future of smarter robots. Most of these are available in various e-book formats as well as print, so toss your tablet computer or smartphone into the beach bag along with the flip-flops.

Seychelles' Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Ronny Jumeau, has reminded a United Nations debate on the pathway to sustainable development that the world's oceans, coasts, and small island countries must be included in the concept of a green economy.

Speaking at the informal debate in the UN General Assembly on the challenges of the green economy held on June 2, Amb. Jumeau stressed that what the small island developing states (SIDS) described as a "blue economy" must be part and parcel of the concept, definition, and development of a climate- and environment-friendly green economy.

Reva Medical, a maker of medical devices in San Diego, wanted to go public last year to raise money to satisfy impatient venture capitalists and finance research for its heart stents.

But it found little investor interest in the United States for an early-stage medical device company that had not yet made a profit.

Reva Medical did what a small but increasing number of young American companies are doing — it looked abroad for money, in Reva’s case the Australian stock exchange.

After an eight-month road show, meeting investors and pitching the prospects of a biodegradable stent, the 12-year-old company sold 25 percent of its stock for $85 million in an initial public offering in December.

Before the Bayh-Dole Act was passed in 1980, the billions of federal dollars sp

ent on scientific research rarely benefited the public through commercial applications. Fewer than 5 percent of government patents were licensed to industry. To push patents into practical use, the law set up a scheme for awarding the rights to institutions, like universities, that have incentive to bring inventions to market.

Since 1980, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, has been granted control of 3,673 patents. A recent study found that companies started by M.I.T.’s graduates, faculty and staff generate annual world sales of $2 trillion.

In a 7-to-2 decision this week, the Supreme Court undermined the act’s purpose by ruling that it does not automatically give a university title to an invention by a faculty member when the research is federally financed.

SCOTLAND’S economy has lost “a generation” of young tycoons, a situation that will hamper its recovery from recession, a new report has revealed.

Fewer aspiring “thirty- something” business leaders are set to follow the successes of billionaire Sir Tom Hunter, the country’s second-richest man, lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone, and Duncan Bannatyne, one of the stars of TV’s Dragons’ Den.

The latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor of more than 80 countries also says that fewer people are likely to set up in business in Scotland between the ages of 18 and 23 than anywhere else in the UK.

The author of the report in Scotland said he could not understand why rates of entrepreneurial activity north of the Border are weaker for the age group, or why they stop growing beyond the age of 29. The figure plateaus from then until people are 50, when it falls.

I recently asked a room of 40 executives to raise their hands if they thought of themselves as creative. This was a group who had been hand selected from their corporation as the future of the company, the big up-and-comers. Only three hands went up.

It feels as if just about everyone is looking to bring creativity into his or her organization. The theory seems to go that hiring creative people could bring much needed innovation, new thinking, and organizational revitalization. A recent study by IBM demonstrates CEOs' belief that "creativity" is the key to success for their companies in the coming years—more than "rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision." So, if creativity is the key to the future of business, then why aren't more executives raising their hands?

Iowa businesses with broadband connections are likely to generate more revenue, a new report shows.

Businesses with high-speed Internet connections have median annual revenues of about $600,000, nearly $300,000 more than businesses without broadband, said Connect Iowa, a group partnering with the Iowa Department of Economic Development to inventory and map broadband use.

The report shows that 72 percent, or about 60,000 Iowa companies, have broadband access; 22 percent, or 18,000 businesses, have no Internet access; 6 percent, about 5,000 companies, either use dial-up or are unsure whether their Internet is broadband.

I’m sure that every one of us who has been out in the business world for a few years can look back with perfect hindsight and name a few college courses that we should have taken. What’s more disconcerting to me is that I can name a few that weren’t even offered!

I won’t even try to cover here the ones you didn’t find for your personal life, like managing personal finances and credit. But on the business side, here is my list of useful courses that we wish existed, but as far as I know, still aren’t generally available:

Basic Office Politics. Office politics involves the complex network of power and status that exists within every business, large and small. Don’t you wish that someone had prepped you on how to read the body language, interpret office gossip, and when to hit the delete key on your email rather than the send key?

Hiring the right people is critical for any business but especially for a small company with relatively few employees. Hiring mistakes not only waste time and money, they create a ripple effect that impacts other employees and your business.

Here are five hiring mistakes you absolutely must avoid:

1. Thinking you can change a leopard’s spots.** All employees typically must follow company rules and guidelines, whether formal or unwritten. Still, some people can’t — or won’t. The outstanding salesman with the incredible track record of generating business and terrorizing admin and support staff won’t immediately play well in your sandbox just because you hired him. The kid who works Dracula hours fueled by Mountain Dew and Cheetos won’t magically transform into a model Mr. 8-to-5. For some people the work itself, and how they perform that work, is what matters most — not the job. Don’t think you can change them.