Page 34 - January 2006

Nathan Myhrvold, part of Microsoft's early brain trust and the former head of its heavily endowed research arm, founded Intellectual Ventures, a fund that he says spends “millions of dollars” annually to support individual inventors in long-term projects. Mr. Myhrvold started his fund about five years ago after he retired from Microsoft; he now backs about 20 inventors in such fields as nanotechnology, optics, computing, biotechnology and medical devices.
“As far as we know, we're the only people who are doing this—which means we're either incredibly smart or incredi- bly dumb,” Mr. Myhrvold said. “There's a network of venture capitalists for start-ups that have created thousands and thousands of businesses, but very little for inventors.”
Mr. Myhrvold says that most public and academic grants are for investigating well-defined research problems—and not for backing, as he does, “an invention before it exists.” His staff of about 50 people files about 25 patent applications a month on behalf of inventors and his fund. He and his staff also help inventors refine ideas, pay for their time and labor and share ownership stakes in projects with them.
“We all love the goose that lays the golden eggs but some- how we've forgotten about the goose,” Mr. Myhrvold said. “This decade I'm hoping will be the decade of the invention.”
Whether or not a new inventive age is coming in America, Mr. West says he plans to continue doing what he's always done. He and Ms. Busch-Vishniac debate, regularly and vociferously, the merits of their respective ideas. But both say their debates are authentic exchanges of viewpoints, not games of one-upmanship.
“You can't have a big ego and be a great inventor,” Mr. West said. “You constantly have to be listening and evaluating.”
Even though he is halfway through his eighth decade, he is pursuing other new projects—collaborating with a col- league at Georgia Tech, for example, to explore improved methods of teleconferencing. Inventing, he says, is the intel- lectual bicycle that he rides each day.
Looking back over the years, Mr. West says he has often gone down the wrong intellectual path. But, he says, that's just how inventors do their thing.
“I think I've had more failures than successes, but I don't see the failures as mistakes because I always learned some- thing from those experiences,” Mr. West said. “I see them as having not achieved the initial goal, nothing more than that.”AT
Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.
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32 Acoustics Today, January 2006