Steve Teig: Most Patents Borrow Ideas

As I said earlier, even Einstein says that almost nothing is invented out of whole cloth. The fact is you're always standing on the shoulders of giants and midgets, both, in trying to construct better technologies. You're always borrowing ideas and making connections people haven't made. So to the extent— so I do think it's possible to start with a preexisting idea and a preexisting technology. If you can extend it in some unexpected way, applying it to a new domain, finding some new wrinkle on it, making a connection between this and that. In fact, almost all of the patents, I would venture to say all of the patents in the patent office, but certainly almost all of them are of the form, one of these things people already knew about with this particular thing added on top of it. Sometimes it's a dramatic thing and that's cool, and sometimes it isn't and that's okay.