Necessity is the mother of invention.

Quick to assemble. It's got a flap, that's the invention.

The patents on those drugs were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available.

All of our patents, our entire approach to patents and invention, is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for we can say what it's for.

Keep that in mind. I put down innovation I've looked for innovation cycles in space I found none.

This invention will reduce global energy consumption by allowing remote control and automation of every outlet in every home and business.

The U.S. government decided to take action, and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes.

And that's sort of like the novelty standard for a U.S. patent, which fashion designers never get rarely get here in the states.

So surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes, we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV AIDS epidemic.

40 years long, with an overlap. You can put that statement on all kinds of different technologies. The interesting thing by the way, the speed here, excuse me, higher speed travel is the title of these innovation cycles. There is none here.

Meant to be a way to incentivize invention, meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge, they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place.

John La Grou unveils an ingenious new technology that will smarten up the electrical outlets in our homes, using microprocessors and RFID tags. The invention, Safeplug, promises to prevent deadly accidents like house fires and to conserve energy.

That the success of sliced bread, like the success of almost everything we've been talking about at this conference, is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like it's about can you get your idea to spread, or not.

And this is how it works Patent holders, inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions, but make those patents available to the Medicines Patent Pool. The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents.

Patenting a new drug helps finance its immense cost to develop but that same patent can put advanced treatments out of reach for sick people in developing nations, at deadly cost. Ellen 't Hoen talks about an elegant, working solution to the problem the Medicines Patent Pool. i i

So you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide whether to invest in the development of this product, unless you know that the licenses to these patents are actually going to be available, you will probably choose to do something else.

At age 14, in poverty and famine, a Malawian boy built a windmill to power his family's home. Now at 22, William Kamkwamba, who speaks at TED, here, for the second time, shares in his own words the moving tale of invention that changed his life.

Dubbed The Wizard of Menlo Park , he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.