Innovation and inspiration

Do we put too much emphasis on invention rather than innovation?

In the most recent edition of New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell dedicates eight pages to former Microsoft wunderkind Nathan Myhrvold and his private company, Intellectual Ventures. The company has a lofty mission statement; to 'empower the next generation of Bells and Einsteins.' In practice, Intellectual Ventures' work is more prosaic: Myhrvold gathers a group of eggheads in a room to come up with ideas, patents them, and then licenses them to interested companies.

Nevertheless, Gladwell is impressed by Myhrvold's collaborative approach, apparently in the name of invention. And Intellectual Ventures is a successful enterprise, proving that the kind of insight that leads to invention can be engineered. Such collaborative approaches to scientific progress are seen as the unexplored 'third way.' Yet bloggers are questioning if the world gets anything useful from such ventures and if there are better ways to encourage innovation.

We is better than me?

• Myhrvold’s formula for idea generation relies upon a multiplier effect; he knows that a group of really smart people brainstorming for a day can be prolific. The original expectation was that Intellectual Ventures would file a hundred patents a year. Now it is filing five hundred per year and has a backlog of three thousand ideas.
• Myhrvold encourages knowledge sharing between those from different backgrounds, temperaments and perspectives so that insight can be orchestrated; Gladwell writes that "if someone who knew how to make a filter had a conversation with someone who knew a lot about cancer and with someone who read the medical literature like a physicist, then maybe you could come up with a cancer treatment."

Ideas are cheap

Yet Techdirt's Mike Masnick writes that Gladwell misses the point. He writes: "while ideas may be a dime a dozen, executing on those ideas is what's difficult." He even argues that Myhrvold's initiatives inhibit innovation, as filed patents make it more difficult for others to help actually make inventions useful. Portfolio's Felix Salmon agrees that ideas generation and appropriation is meaningless: "one thing I found unconvincing about Carly Fiorina, former chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, was that she constantly cited how many patents were being filed under her leadership as if that proved something.". He adds that Intellectual Ventures, far from encouraging innovation, actually acts as a 'patent troll', joylessly accumulating patents not to develop products, but to squeeze licensing fees out of large companies.

Cash for solutions?

There is still hope for genuine inventors and innovators amid the patent squatters. Tim Harford, the Financial Times' 'Undercover Economist' writes that governments, private foundations and even corporations are rediscovering the value of offering prizes for innovative products. 

• Mojave Aerospace Ventures won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, designed to promote private space flight in 2004, after the successful flights of SpaceShipOne.
• Five national governments and the Gates Foundation are offering a $1.5 billion "advanced market commitment" to subsidise the developers and suppliers of a more effective vaccine against pneumococcal diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis and bronchitis.
• Innocentive provides an exchange where 'seekers' can offer cash to 'solvers.'

You can’t force 'em

Inducing innovation may be a phenomenal waste of time and money. The proof is Toyota, which defines innovation as an incremental process in which the goal is not making quantum leaps, but improving ideas and work processes on a daily basis. The principle is often known by its Japanese name, kaizen -- continuous improvement. James Surowiecki writes that the Japanese company "rejects the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it’s taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible." He adds that Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as US companies do.