The Big Idea: Capital Market Funds For Invention - Harvard Business Review

Here is a very interesting idea from Nathan Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. As the cofounder of Intellectual Ventures, he has been reviled as a patent troll - a renegade who buys up patents and uses them to hold up companies. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In this worthwhile article from Harvard Business Review, he proposes the world needs a capital market for invention like the venture capital market for start-ups and the private equity market for revitalizing inefficient companies.

The argument: Inventing—producing useful, patent-worthy ideas—is a dysfunctional, cash-starved activity that’s overly dependent on government largesse because it is not organized as a for-profit activity.

A better approach: Create a market where patents can be efficiently bought, sold, or licensed through investment funds that manage the high risks by amassing huge portfolios of patents and packaging them to maximize their value. Professional invention capitalists would not only operate such funds but also provide services to help companies, universities, and solo inventors to develop and monetize their ideas.

Here is the entire article and in my view it is genuinely an interesting concept.