Everyone wants to know how to build the next Silicon Valley: an innovation hub that draws talent and capital, and that creates jobs, companies, and whole new industries. Many policymakers are overlooking an essential ingredient: demand. Read More

If you’re a history buff, Forbes.com has a great column this week on how and why the Founding Fathers consciously designed the U.S. patent system to work the way it does. Read More

Intellectual Ventures is deeply invested in the business of ideas. We have built our business on the concept that ideas are valuable, and we work hard to create an invention marketplace by investing in, improving, and monetizing invention. Read More

In an important footnote to U.S. economic history, July 31, 1790 marks the date of the first patent granted in the U.S. The Patent Board had only recently been signed into law, and the patent application submitted for improvements “in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process” was reviewed by no less than Secretary of State and patent-examiner-in-chief, Thomas Jefferson. Read More

With D.C. hotly debating what’s required for the next phase of U.S. economic growth this week, we were reminded of the excellent work of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute earlier this year, with the publication of “Patenting Prosperity: Invention and Economic Performance in the United States and its Metropolitan Areas” Read More