Since stepping down as the company's chief technology officer five years ago, Myhrvold has pursued paleontology, a long-standing hobby, by funding dinosaur digs. But Myhrvold has more on his mind these days than searching for prehistoric bones. He's also the founder of Intellectual Ventures, a somewhat mysterious and controversial start-up.
Combining the disciplines of a venture capital firm, a think tank and an intellectual-property firm, the company gathers well-known inventors for "invention sessions," hoping the get-togethers will one day result in hugely profitable patents. Investors are said to include Microsoft, Google and Intel. Myhrvold sees the company as a forum where brilliant minds will have the room and luxury to simply create.
But critics take a dimmer view of the venture. They say it will encourage patent litigation and, paradoxically, discourage innovation. Whatever your point of view, Intellectual Ventures could well become one of the central figures in the ongoing patent debate. Myhrvold spoke with ZDNet Australia sister site CNET News.com about the decline in invention, his company, and why some people get bent out of shape when the conversation turns to intellectual property.
Q: You've talked about the difference between research and invention in the past. What is the difference?
Myhrvold: Most engineers who work for companies doing technology are paid to build products, not to invent something new. They do invent things new, but the percentage whose actual job title is inventor or whose job function is primarily inventing is very small. Almost no company has people who are really dedicated to invent new technology without worrying about whether it's in a new product or not.
Can you give an example of something in the past 20 years that is an invention, versus something that emerged from research as an extrapolation of existing products?
Myhrvold: The graphical user interface was a hell of an invention. The microprocessor was an invention. Inside every technology product is a litany of different inventions. Nevertheless, it turns out that not only are people not inventing as much, but the inventing that does occur is highly constrained, and it's constrained because companies try to do what will work within their next product release cycle. And academics do either the thing that their graduates could get a thesis on or the things that will get them a paper and get them tenure.
How did we slip into this situation?
Myhrvold: It's risky and people don't want to fund it. Frequently, breakthroughs happen outside the area that you originally started working with. The guys at Xerox PARC had some clear breakthroughs: the graphical user interface, networks, tons of stuff that totally contributed to the PC world as we know it today. But they were kind of in left field from the people who were funding them, which was a copier company.
At Microsoft I had to fight this perception in order to start Microsoft Research. The received wisdom was that it was silly to invest in research because -- look at Xerox, look at Bell Labs, look at IBM Research. They invent SQL, and Larry Ellison makes all the money from it!
Being an inventor almost sounds like a 19th century sort of occupation.
Myhrvold: Exactly! The entire 19th century was about doing exactly this. Every important invention was some crazy individual, and it was an established profession. If you were an inventor, people would recognise what that was. If you go to a cocktail party now and someone says that they're an inventor, it's very strange. Most people's idea of an inventor is that crazy guy from the "Back to the Future" movies.
So how did you come up with Intellectual Ventures?
Myhrvold: What we set out to do is to say, "Let's honour invention and inventions. Let's take a company whose only focus is investing in invention." We're not going to make products. When I say we won't make products, it's not because products are bad -- products are wonderful -- but the world already has a very well-developed infrastructure for dealing with products and product-oriented ideas and product-oriented companies.
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