The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is a set of initiatives for providing accelerated patent prosecution procedures by sharing information between some patent offices. It also permits each participating patent office to benefit from the work previously done by the other patent office, with the goal of reducing examination workload and improving patent quality. An updated "PPH 2.0" system under the program name "Mottainai" (a Japanese word meaning "wasteful") began among several national patent offices in mid-2011.