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Under the European Patent Convention (EPC), European patents shall be granted for inventions which ''inter alia'' involve an inventive step. The central legal provision explaining what this means, i.e. the central legal provision relating to the inventive step under the EPC, is . It provides that an invention, having regard to the state of the art, must not be obvious to a person skilled in the art. The Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) have developed an approach, called the "problem-solution approach", to assess whether an invention involves an inventive step. == Problem-solution approach == The Examining Divisions, the Opposition Divisions, and the Boards of Appeal of the EPO predominantly apply the "problem-solution approach" in order to assess and decide whether an invention involves an inventive step. The problem-solution approach was "selected" mostly for historical and pragmatic reasons. Indeed, when setting up the European Patent Convention, the approaches to assess inventivity in national countries differed substantially from each other, and it was felt that a unique, consistent approach to inventity was needed. The "problem-solution approach" was reportedly invented by Hungarian former Board of Appeal member G. Szabó. The problem-solution approach essentially consists in three steps: # identifying the ''closest prior art'', i.e. the most relevant piece of prior art, and determining the difference(s) between the invention and the closest prior art; # determining the technical effect brought about by the difference(s), and that defines the ''objective technical problem'' (namely, in the view of the closest prior art, the technical problem which the claimed invention addresses and successfully solves); and # examining ''whether'' or not ''the claimed solution'' to the objective technical problem ''is obvious'' for the skilled person in view of the state of the art in general. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Inventive step under the European Patent Convention」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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