The future of countries with well-educated people and few natural resources lies in doing research and selling the results to others. Patents are one mechanism to regulate the finances (along with copyright and trade secrets). Patents work fine in fields like engineering and chemicals.

I'm sorry for IT developers and IT companies that patents are not working well in IT, since software secrets are easily reverse-engineered, and thus copyright is no help. All that is left is continual improvement, which is a hard slog to earn good money from.