Ingo Kober is worried about the high price of European inventiveness - and it's likely to get worse.
Patent protection is fundamental to industrial innovation.
In particular, Kober would like to trim the cost of translating patents, which now accounts for 40 percent of the cost of a European patent. And the problem is getting worse. He expects costs will more than double within a decade as the European Union expands. The issue of patent costs sounds arcane but has wide significance. If there's anything Europe could use right now, it's a wave of technological expansion, like the one it experienced in the late 19th century.