Since the Venetian Patent Statute of 1474, patents have been used to incentive innovation. By granting their owners an exclusive right to stop others from exploiting their inventions, patents provide a competitive edge.
However, in times like these, cooperation is more important than competition.
That’s why I’m delighted to announce that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is opening up our treasure trove of patented innovations to accelerate everyone’s response to the health crisis we face. Today, we signed the Open COVID Pledge, which grants free access to all of our patented technologies for the purpose of diagnosing, preventing, containing and treating COVID-191.
HPE’s patented assets are already helping organizations around the world to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are a few examples:
- Researchers around the world are using our supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to advance diagnosis or treatment of COVID-19, including through the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. As a member of the consortium, we provide supercomputing software and applications expertise free of charge to help researchers port, run, and optimize essential applications.
- Our Wi-Fi technologies and location-based services are essential for quickly establishing pop-up clinics and hospitals, such as the ferry GNV Splendid, which was transformed into a floating hospital, moored in Genoa, Italy. These technologies can give doctors online access to patient medical records and help them locate essential instruments.
- Cryo-electron microscopy is a breakthrough technology with the power to shorten the time to drug discovery and development. Our integrated HPE Apollo compute and storage systems remove bottlenecks when moving data from the microscope to analytics, thanks to faster data transfer technologies, optimized storage, and better integration of compute, storage, and analysis functions within the system.
With the Open COVID Pledge, organizations are now free to use these and other HPE technologies without worrying about HPE’s patents. They are free to use and combine HPE technologies with their own technologies to create breakthrough solutions to combat COVID-19.
HPE has a rich heritage of sharing its intellectual property and technology to advance the way people live and work, and this patent pledge reflects our continuing commitment to those principles. We hope other innovators will join us in this pledge. That’s the way we’ll beat this pandemic.
- Brett Alten is Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
