Institute For The Future

Lightweight R&D Infrastructure

Interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, and his company called Intellectual Ventures www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell/. First, having just spent a few days working with Nathan, I found the following description of him hilarious:

"Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale."

Second, the article points out that Myhrvold and his company are producing an extraordinary efficient innovation machine, and the recipe is quite easy--bring together a few brilliant, often excentric, people from different crosswalks of life and different areas of expertise, engage them in a free flowing brainstorming session, and sparks, or in this case, patentable inventions, will fly. Currently Intellectual Ventures is patenting an average of 500 inventions a year, and it just licensed a cluster of its patents for $80 milion. Compare this to an average corporate R&D lab. Unlike an R&D lab, IV has few staff and relies on aggregating networks of top minds for its brainstorming sessions that provide impetus for further development work. Low infrastructure costs, low overhead, high degree of flexibility and ability to assemble the best resources on an ad hoc basis. Perfect example of light R&D infrastructure.

Finally, another interesting fact Gladwell reminds us of is not to overestimate significance of individual inventors. Simultaneous identical discoveries are usually made by several people around the same time; unforuantely only one of the inventors gets the recognition, the other fades into obscurity. This is what science historians call "multiples." As Gladwell points out:

"One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland."

So whatever you or your scientists are working on today, assume someone else is doing the same thing.