BusinessWeek has posted a detailed and fascinating profile of Nathan Myrhvold’s invention-generation-and-patent-acquisition-and-licensing firm, Intellectual Ventures. [ Hat tip to Patent Prospector. ]

The profile - which you should read if you’re interested in the business of i.p. licensing - makes a clear distinction between IV’s invention generation sessions (a.k.a. brainstorming sessions) and its patent acquisitions program.

Both components of IV’s strategy are fun to consider, and the combination is downright tantalizing.

Given my recent focus on patent law’s nonobviousness requirement, I’m particularly struck by Myrhvold’s insight, reflected in the way he structures the brainstorming sessions, that nonobvious invention so often lies in using information from far outside the art that is most pertinent to the problem at hand. (In other words, ordinary artisans are inventive within the conventional wisdom, and with the conventional tools, of their chosen art. The nonobviousness requirement reflects this fact by focusing, in section 103, on the prior art that is pertinent to the problem by the ordinary artisan’s lights.) Consider these passages, from the profile:

On June 17 it invited 10 of the most blindingly brilliant doctors and scientists in the country to a daylong brainstorming session at its headquarters in a nondescript office building next to a swamp in Bellevue, Wash. Assembling around a conference table, the diverse group, which included physicists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, physicians from several major medical centers, and a Stanford University postdoctoral fellow in bioengineering, spent the day pondering a complex question: How can surgery be improved? …

Myhrvold’s time at Microsoft planted the seeds that would grow into his vision of IV, which he and Edward Jung, who had also been a top scientist at Microsoft, co-founded in 2000. One formative experience was his role in creating Microsoft Research, which now employs more than 700 researchers. A key insight he had in developing the operation, he says, is that predicting which inventions will be successful is enormously risky, and the only way to mitigate that risk is to invent on a very large scale. So just as a stock fund manager spreads his exposure over many positions, IV is aiming for a diversified portfolio of patents.

The invention sessions are part of that strategy. Myhrvold believes they enable IV to come up with breakthrough ideas because they combine the insights of an interdisciplinary group of experts in a way that rarely happens in industry, where expertise tends to be siloed. At the June 17 session, for instance, Lowell L. Wood Jr., a physicist who once designed nuclear weapons; Michael A. Smith, a chest surgeon from the University of Southern California; and Edward S. Boyden III, a biomechanical engineer, are among those at the table who watch as neurosurgeon Dennis J. Rivet gets up and walks over to the whiteboard.

This companion piece focuses on the IV brainstorming sessions.  Read all about it!