[yvdriess]

Anecdotally, in my field, the actual interesting ideas are kept a company secret. The ideas that are not being deployed for competitive advantage are shoveled into salami-sliced patents to be deployed as ammunition in the big-corpo patent warfare battlefield. But here I am talking about a field where implementation trumps ideas. In some fields, e.g. pharma, most of the work and expense lies in finding a needle in a haystack. Once the product hits the market, the secret is out.

In both cases, I feel that the patent system fails its goal to make trade secrets public.