Intellectual Ventures works in collaboration with inventors right from the idea stage, files thousands of patent applications a year and licenses inventions in over 30 technology areas.
Here is a company that is open to ideas, literally! Intellectual Ventures (IV), founded by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung in the year 2000,
is focused on creating, acquiring and licensing inventions in a variety of technology areas. The US-based company commercializes inventions through licensing, spin-offs, joint ventures and industry partnerships
IV made a formal entry into India earlier this month. The company’s regional headquarters in Singapore will keep an oversight on operations in India, Japan, China and South Korea. The India office is located in Bangalore. With Asia high on its agenda, IV plans to work in close coordination with the scientific community in the continent, helping them with the necessary resources to boost the invention ecosystem.
On the sidelines of the launch event, Myhrvold told DARE: “If you have no way to commercialize an idea, why be serious about it. It’s just like saying, ‘hey, get my car and we go three blocks and run out of gas’. Why do it? There is no reason to get a patent if you have no way to market that patent. It is a dead end.”
According to Jung, “Despite the growing number of leading scientists, researchers, technologists and other inventors in Asia, many of these innovators lacked access to the appropriate resources required to bring their ideas to a larger global audience. I am struck by the gap between Asia’s collective, innovative talent and the lack of resources for Asia’s greatest inventors. IV is working to fill this gap with our Asia invention initiative.”
In India, IV plans to work with select individual inventors, local universities, research institutes and venture companies. Nanotechnology, biotechnology, green-tech, and software are among the areas of interest for IV in India.
Prior to launching Intellectual Ventures, Myhrvold spent 14 years at Microsoft helping the software giant find Microsoft Research and several other technology groups that were responsible for some of the most successful products that came out of its stable. He has been a postdoctoral fellow in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University, having worked with Professor Stephen Hawking on research in cosmology, quantum field theory in curved space time and quantum theories of gravitation. Myhrvold has 18 patents to his credit with over 100 awaiting approval. How are ideas filtered at IV? How many reach the product and market stage? Isn’t it true that many ideas die a slow death because of lack of incentives? Is IV making the process of thinking a lucrative proposition? How will Indian researchers and entrepreneurs benefit from IV’s entry into India and vice-versa? Different ideas require different ecosystems to nurture them. How is the diversity of ideas handled at IV? How much money does IV plan to invest in India in the next five years? |
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