Here in China as Executive Vice President, Head of Asia Pacific, for IP.com, I'm seeing so much innovation now on display at Shanghai Expo 2010.

Visitors will fully appreciate the perseverance in innovation, sustainability and community construction of the multi-cultural American society through state-of -the-art technology, as the USA Pavilion officially opens to public this morning in the Expo site.

Covering an area of around 6,000 square metres, the USA Pavilion is a gray steel structure meant to resemble an eagle stretching its wings in welcome. The pavilion presents a dynamic and emotional story that conveys four core concepts: sustainability, teamwork, health and the spirit of striving for success.

The overall theme of the pavilion is "Rise to the Challenge." In keeping with the Expo's theme of "Better City, Better Life," the challenges depicted will be creating environmentally sustainable communities, engaging in a healthy lifestyle and using technology to improve people's lives. The pavilion showcases American business and technology, as well as culture and values, to foster stronger friendship between the American and Chinese peoples.

The exhibition tells the story of the American spirit of perseverance, innovation and community-building in a multi-dimensional, high-tech presentation in four parts. It presents the United States as a place of opportunity and diversity where people come together to change their communities for the better.

I encourage my friends and colleagues back in the United States to take the opportunity during this World's Fair Shanghai Expo 2010 to visit China and see for themselves all the new and exciting things here. The Chinese, you'll discover, are a very resourceful and innovative people.

To compensate for these drawbacks and make the Eco-Patent Commons as useful and powerful as it can be, the initiative requires expansion to offer truly recent inventions that have not spent years in the patent application process. This involves widening the scope of the initiative to include non-patented inventions that have yet to be marketed and made public.

One way to make these inventions available is through enabled invention disclosures. An enabled invention disclosure (also called “defensive publication” or “technical bulletin”) is a written description of an invention that ideally has the same degree of detail as an issued patent. Therefore a well-written invention disclosure provides sufficient information to the reader to understand and use the invention.

Many companies successfully use enabled invention disclosures as part of their intellectual property (IP) strategies. Companies frequently have inventions that they do not wish to patent because the patent process is so expensive, including invention development costs, legal preparation and patent prosecution fees. However, companies also wish to prevent competitors from patenting those same inventions.

By using enabled invention disclosures to publish the invention, companies accomplish both goals: they save the cost of patenting but they also establish a “prior art bar” to obtaining the patent and make it impossible for competitors to claim it the invention as their own. Several Web site forums exist for publishing inventions, including ip.com and www.researchdisclosure.com.

The Eco-Patent Commons should be expanded to include these enabled invention disclosures. Many inventions that companies deem non-strategic for patent application and instead decide to publish may be excellent candidates to be donated to the Eco-Patent Commons. These published inventions would be truly new, fresh and useful -- a good first step to creating the true springboard for green innovation that the Eco-Patent Commons was meant to be.