Getting to know IV

For our first post, we wanted to start with the question we get most – What does IV do anyway?

Our CEO, Nathan Myhrvold, wrote an in-depth article earlier this year on just this topic for Harvard Business Review. If you really want to understand IV’s vision and business model, this is the best resource.

If you just want the summary: IV’s goal is to lead the way in building an invention capital market.  This is an ambitious vision with a long timescale, but we are a committed bunch of people!

Our business model has many moving parts but basically, we treat invention as an asset.  We want to make investing in this asset class a profitable activity.  Bottom line is: ideas are valuable.  It’s important that inventors get paid for their inventions and that corporate innovators who understand the competitive value of a strong IP portfolio have an efficient way to find the inventions they need to operate freely and competitively. 

To get to our goal, we fund and support inventors to come up with new ideas and we invest in existing inventions.  We then work to package inventions and get them into the market through a variety of business development and licensing efforts.  We also have a group of projects we do around what we call global good efforts -- these are projects focused on finding solutions for some of the world’s hard problems in energy, climate and global health – particularly malaria.

Face it: inventors make people a bit nostalgic. We all have our favorite inventor story. Yet the world has taken the importance of invention for granted. By making invention a for-profit activity, we believe we will incentivize more people to take necessary risks on coming up with radical new solutions and ultimately the world will benefit. 

This sums up our first official blog post. We hope to update the blog weekly, but please bear with us as we get into the groove of regular posts. You can also sign up for the blog’s RSS feed and follow IV on Twitter @IVinvents.