What would happen if you could patent ideas? Would we see more novel startups?

I don't like this concept of patenting ideas. Coming up with a great idea is just a small factor of making it successful. It seems that this would result in a crazy amount of patents that would mostly never amount to anything but act as a safety to the idea man.

I don't think the lack of an idea patent is discouraging anyone from pursuing startups. If someone had a truly great idea, they would pursue it and patent the implementation.

Ideas patent would just result in a patent for every trivial idea out there, severely limiting people who can actually execute it.

I genuinely believe if you could patent ideas...the world would be a dangerous place. With regard to more novelty - not a chance. If the idea is good enough, do what you have to do to make it happen.

This sounds a lot like a business method patent, which is generally considered a very bad idea.

A startup that faces no competition for 14 years isn't going to be a worthwhile one anyway.

The idea is fundamentally disgusting. Giving someone a government enforced monopoly on a thought. It's not even interesting to speculate about- it's completely untenable- impossible to organize and define, impossible (and immoral) to enforce, and it would completely kill innovation and economic growth. All ideas are derived. [no offense, amichail- I know you were just throwing it out there]

One could make the argument that more people would be willing to pursue more novel startups with the protection of an idea patent.

the point of the patent is to protect your work for discovering/implementating a method that is not state-of-art for solving a problem, not patent the problem(idea) it self. Thats why you can have many methods (i.e many patents) solving the same problem...

Of course you can patent also business processes and designs...