Image representing Steve Jobs as depicted in C...

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How do you make sense of the Apple vs Samsung patent case? Now that Google is in the spotlight over discovery you might say it's really about Apple vs Android. But maybe not. The case, in fact, holds big lessons on how business and innovation are evolving. What are they?

One of the changes Steve Jobs brought to Apple, and to the world of business, according to former patent lawyer and CEO of patent advisory firm Article One Partners, Cheryl Milone, was to strategize the company's future around the design patent.

"Steve Jobs decided to use design patents much more than before," says Cheryl, commenting, in passing, on the elegance of Apple's design patents - almost as elegant as their products. "Jobs was very prescient about this," she adds, referring to how significant design has become.

Cheryl's company, Article One, is heavily inv0lved in helping companies establish transparency around patenting disputes - she uses crowdsourcing to research issues like prior art. So she's full time on the fundamental issues that lead to conflict.

Design, she points out, now moves markets in major ways. In fact, design moves markets in ways that inventions used to. And in the case of the iPhone design transformed the market.

That is why design needs to be treated in the same way as an invention, according to her and indeed, to varying degrees, members of the American judiciary.

Seen this way, Apple's persistence with the case against Samsung is not at all about an old "thermonuclear" dispute with Google over Android. It's all about the power of usability vs the power of manufacture, the power of businesses that have migrated to the service economy, vs those that make their money by differentiating product at a more fundamental level. In a sense it is about the future of the American economy vs the upcoming Asian economy.

The dispute then is about how American tech has re-framed the economy around what it does rather than what it outsources

Here is Cheryl again:

"The outcome of this trial will govern the development of an industry where consumer marketing is the key driver, whether it's breakthrough designs or consumer usability such as easy texting or photo sharing. If Apple succeeds in keeping Samsung at bay, industry designs will diverge and strengthen Apple’s market advantage. Even with the case trending to support design patent infringement by Samsung, success requires proof on damages as well. If Apple’s damages case falls short, designs will become more uniform in the smartphone market.

There's little doubt that Cheryl is right about that. But think about the deep background to this - changes in how enterprises create wealth.

In countries like America, many companies have been on a classic production-to-service company journey, from making things to designing services.

We furnish that journey with significant myths about our own potency. We are better at design, and we are faster to the creative economy. Hence, what we want to do is protect those advantages - like design and looking good.

Behind all this though we are bifurcating into a world where software and design patents rule, in one culture, and old fashioned manufacturing invention rules in another. For Apple vs Samsung you could read America vs Asia.

A good example is Apple's recent patents that specify AMOLED technologies, particularly in flexible displays. Apple is not an inventor of AMOLED - in fact the invention patents are spread out among a number of companies, including Samsung, a company that has been investing in AMOLED and AMOLED production design for 11 years.

Take a look at this from their perspective and they are being asked to believe that their creative investments, and the billions it takes to set up to produce OLED and AMOLED are worth a whole lot less than those of a western company that provides the user access point - the design and UX.

Doesn't that sound, potentially, like we are out to protect what we now do, and denigrating manufacturing in the process?

I ask that because it is a question that troubles me. As American companies come to rely on Asian markets like China and India for their growth, are we storing up a problem for, say, five years down the road, when the Chinese have a more sophisticated patent system and a Samsung or similar company decides its purpose is better served by keeping an Apple or a Google out, through patent conflicts around what goes into a phone rather than what it looks like?

The long and short of it is that the bifurcation of capability between design and manufacture is a false one.  The next generation of design is going to build on the flexibility and ingenuity of new display formats.

While Cheryl rightly points out that one answer to this conflict, the Apple vs Samsung one, is to create more transparency around patents, another answer is that American companies would be better served by making more - good old fashioned manufacture - rather than leave the maker patent field to competitors because relying on the genius of people like Steve Jobs is higher risk than we imagine.