Intellectual Ventures Fosters The Art Of Invention

Article preview from Start-Up - April 1, 2011

The wellsprings of innovation for medical device industry are drying up. The R&D departments of product companies are constrained by the need to serve core businesses with in-house skill sets; their eyes are trained on the next iteration of a product, or products one or two cycles out. Universities throw off interesting bits of intellectual property from time to time, a fringe benefit of academic research, but in a haphazard manner, since such centers of learning aren't in the business of looking to create commercially viable products. Venture capitalists do create value by commercializing early stage ideas, but, these days, only after enough technological, clinical and market validation, and that sometimes means doing something that's been done before, just with a slight twist that makes it better.

Intellectual Ventures Fosters The Art Of Invention

Article preview from Start-Up - April 1, 2011

Intellectual Ventures sells inventions and inventiveness, two commodities that do not flow freely in the ecosystems of business today. Consider the limitations to the sources of innovation for the medical device industry. The research & development departments of product companies are constrained by the need to serve core businesses with in-house skill sets; their eyes are trained on the next iteration of a product, or products one or two cycles out. Universities throw off interesting bits of intellectual property from time to time, a fringe benefit of academic research, but in a haphazard manner, since such centers of learning aren't in the business of looking to create commercially viable products. Venture capitalists do create value by commercializing early stage ideas, but only after enough technological, clinical and market validation, and that sometimes means doing something that's been done before, just with a slight twist that makes it better. Who can support the unfettered, multi-disciplinary out-of-the box thinking that will meet the needs of business five years from now and beyond?

Intellectual Ventures believes it can. The company was founded in 2000 by Nathan Myhrvold, PhD, the former chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft Corp., and Edward Jung, Microsoft's chief architect and adviser to the executive staff. Intellectual Ventures fosters the good, old-fashioned Thomas Edison style of inventing with a focus on computer science, physics/energy/advanced materials, and its newest sector, health technologies. "We invent explicitly on demand to solve specific problems and do so in advance of the rest of the market," says Nathan Myhrvold.

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