Before Carly Fiorina was fired as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard in February, she had a standard reply when asked whether HP was living up to its creative traditions under her leadership. She said that it filed 11 patents a day compared with three when she arrived in 1999.

This always struck me as fatuous. For one thing, the number of patents proved nothing about their quality. Even worse, it suggested a culture in which focus on innovation had been replaced by a bureaucratic effort to claim intellectual property. It said more about the ingenuity of HP's lawyers than its scientists.