Blog Post On The SUCCESS Act
THE SUCCESS ACT: WHERE WE STAND & THE PATH FORWARD
In this post, Brittany Amadi and Gary M. Fox outline the goals and findings of Congress’ SUCCESS Act and expose the correlation between lack of diverse inventors and lack of diversity within the STEM field.
The SUCCESS Act was intended to address racial and gender disparity in USPTO applications by requiring the government to conduct a study on applications submitted by and patents issued to women, minorities, and veterans. Later on in October 2019, the bleak findings were made public and the USPTO carried on with five recommendations to address the disappointing report, which Amadi and Fox draw out in this post.
But Amadi and Fox also suggest that, while good starting points, the Act and the following recommendations fail to address the root of the problem. They argue that it is only and until we tackle the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the STEM field during the earlier stages of intellectual development that we can mitigate discrepancies of underrepresentation in inventorship.
For more on this topic, check out these posts:
IIPSJ’s Comments to USPTO on strategy for National Council for Expanding American Innovation
