10. Secondary indicia in the assessment of inventive step
10.4. Satisfaction of a long-felt need
The fact that the state of the art has been inactive over a long period prior to the invention may be an indication that an inventive step is involved if during that time an urgent need for improvement has demonstrably existed (see T 109/82, OJ 1984, 473; T 555/91; T 699/91). This indication is closely linked to the positive indications of the time factor and age of the cited document.
In T 605/91 the board stated that it was not sufficient if only one individual skilled person discovered a "long-felt need". Only if various and repeated attempts to deal with the relevant disadvantages could be identified would such a long-felt need appear to have persisted.
In T 1014/92 the board did not accept the appellant's further argument that the long period of time (about 35 years) during which documents (1) and (2) had been available to the public without having been combined, was in itself cogent evidence that there was no obvious connection between them. The board held that this conclusion might only be drawn if evidence relating to time were corroborated by other evidence, such as long-felt want (see also T 1183/06).
In T 271/84 (OJ 1987, 405) the board found that where a process had been performed successfully on a commercial scale for more than 20 years in spite of economic disadvantages associated with it, and the claimed invention provided a solution to the technical problem of avoiding such economic disadvantages, this supported a finding of inventive step.
- T 1246/21
Catchword:
Since Article 56 EPC and the final stage of the problem‑solution approach both consider what is obvious to a person skilled in the art, an inventive step cannot be denied solely on the finding that the claimed subject-matter is not directly and unambiguously disclosed from the combination of two documents. In other words, when considering the question of whether an invention is obvious starting from a document representing the closest prior art in combination with another document, it is not the mere sum of the teachings of these two documents that has to be considered; the skilled person's common general knowledge and skills must also be taken into account when combining the two documents.