What are the creative requirements of patents?

At the beginning of the establishment of the patent system, there was only novelty, but later it was found that novelty was not enough. If an invention has not been created before, but its improvement is actually of little technical content, it is not suitable to grant a patent. Therefore, a higher authorization condition, creativity, also known as non-obviousness, is introduced into the patent system to judge the "technical content" of an invention.

To judge whether a patent application is creative, there are basically several steps: (1) positioning, looking for the closest technical solution to the application as the comparison object; (2) Find out the difference between the two technical schemes; (3) Evaluation, evaluating whether this difference is easy to think of.

Of these three steps, the third step is subjective, and different people give different judgments. Therefore, some detailed rules have been formulated in the patent system to reduce subjectivity in this respect. Of course, there are some differences in the specific rules of different countries. Another common saying about creativity is that if an invention is not obvious to "insiders" (in fact, it refers to experts in a specific field), then the invention meets the requirements of creativity.

On the other hand, the creative standard is also an important policy lever in the patent system. If you want to raise the threshold of patent application a little, it is a very effective way to raise the standard of creativity appropriately.