The patent system is a bit of a mess, and I’ve written a few times about how a fixation on patents is not a good sign for innovation, either individually as organizations or collectively.

Students of the Open Innovation, Leveraging IBM Watson course at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley believe they can utilize the supercomputer to fix things.

The students are visiting the IBM headquarters in New York to test out their application in a battle with nine other teams in a $100,000 competition as part of the Watson Ecosystem.

Whilst Watson is probably best known for winning Jeopardy, it’s ability to process natural language, generate and evaluate hypothesis and incorporate dynamic learning open up a wide range of opportunities.

The Open Innovation, Leveraging IBM Watson course is taught in 10 universities across North America, and the hope is that it will create a number of talented young people capable of working with the computer.

The Berkley patent application uses the natural language processing abilities of Watson to aid organizations in their search for potential patent overlaps more quickly than is currently possible.

Sadly (in my opinion), the app does little to smooth the flow of innovation, but rather looks to reduce the cost of filing patent applications and help them to protect their IP from rivals.

They developed their system further through a partnership with an existing Berkeley startup working on a similar project.

“We were connected to (the startup) and had a similar idea,” they say. “They were using programmatic computing to solve a problem and we thought if we could use Watson, the results would be even better. The way you train Watson is to train it to think, and Watson becomes more human in that sense.”

A slightly more interesting project was the runner up from Berkeley.  The project had developed a health related app that would allow hospitals to follow up with patients after they leave the hospital.

The field of cognitive computing is one that IBM are particularly keen to explore with Watson.  Even the smartest doctor will only have access to perhaps a few dozen papers or results in their mind.  Watson can process the equivalent of a million books inside a second.

You can see from the video below how Watson is currently being used in a care environment.  Alas, the healthcare app didn’t progress further in the competition, but hopefully others will be applying their insights in a healthcare setting.

The winners of the challenge will receive $50,000 from the Watson Ecosystem group and $50,000 from The Entrepreneur’s Fund, a tech venture capital group.  The students will also gain access to the Developer Cloud and the various other aspects of the Ecosystem.