Friday, January 27, 2017 T 1379/11 - Combinations of technical and non-technical features

In this appeal against a decision of the Examining Division the claims have a combination of technical and non-technical features and this plays an important role in the inventive step reasoning of the Board. The question is whether the applicant has really added something technical or that the claimed method is an obvious implementation of business requirements in a know technical system. In this case there are also some interesting paragraphs about the selection of the closest prior art - the Board writes "The Examining Division made an attempt to apply both criteria... but failed to do so in a convincing manner.".