BigShinyThing

Writing in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reports back from the the world of Nathan Myhrvold, ex-Microsoft zillionaire and founder of Intellectual Ventures, a business designed to produce genius-level innovations on demand.

The skinny? World-changing inventions are often dreamt up almost simultaneously by a number of people, only one of whom generally gets the prize of fame and success. To Myhrvold and his crew, this suggested that inventions and innovations are ‘of their time’ — when the cultural and technological conditions are just-so, innovations like the telephone or calculus will appear, not just to one genius, but to many clever thinkers, around the world. So why not put together a top team of eclectic ‘general specialists’, and try and tap the zeitgeist for some revenue?

Intellectual Ventures was founded to sniff out ideas ‘in the air’, patent them up, then license them out for fun and profit. It doesn’t exactly claim to have any geniuses around its table of big thinkers, but there’s at least a geeky obsessiveness about their cross-disciplinary expertise and interests. Whatever. Their process works.