U.S. President Barack Obama has signed a bill that streamlines U.S. patent and trademark law during a visit to a science and technology high school outside Washington.

The president said to excel in the global marketplace, the United States must be the best in the world at building, educating, and innovating. He said the change in patent law is part of the agenda for making the country competitive in the long term.

White House officials say processing patent applications faster, cutting down a backlog of nearly 700,000 applications, will speed up creation of new jobs.

The U.S. Patent Office itself is expected to open satellite offices across the country and hire as many as 2,000 more patent examiners over the next fiscal year.

The legislation changes the U.S. system of issuing patents from “first-to-invent” to the “first-to-file” a patent application, which is standard in much of the rest of the world. Previously, the patent system has been clogged by legal battles over which applicant was the first to invent a given product.