Myhrvold's Myth: Invention Capital

from the cute-phrase,-dumb-idea dept

Nathan Myhrvold may have a way with words, but it doesn't mean that what he's doing with Intellectual Ventures makes any sense. At the D: conference yesterday, Myrhvold tried to position his company as being in the "invention capital" business, talking about how he's creating a model to fund inventions, and even comparing himself to Thomas Edison (while dancing around several questions that tried to get him to point out what the company has actually done other than hoard patents). This is a modification on the easily debunked claim he made a couple weeks ago about how owning a patent and not using it to build a product was the same as investing in a company and not working there.

But, the real problem goes right back to the core issue that was brought out in Malcolm Gladwell's profile of Myhrvold. Ideas are popping up everywhere. It's the execution that matters. Lots of folks are having similar ideas at about the same time, but those ideas are meaningless without the corresponding execution (at which point many people often realize the original idea wasn't that interesting in the first place). So, with ideas being plentiful and execution being scarce, it doesn't make sense to "invest" in ideas separate from the execution. The only way that it would make sense is if you then were taking those ideas and artificially trying to limit their usefulness -- which is exactly what Myhrvold is doing with IV. He's artificially trying to limit the use of ideas, and make it more expensive for anyone to execute on those ideas. The very concept of what he's doing is to hold back innovation and progress. That's the exact opposite of what the patent system was intended to do.

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