Myhrvold aims to reinvent the spirit of inventing

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff, 9/28/2003

Nathan P. Myhrvold, the frenetic and intellectually versatile founder of Microsoft Research, may turn out to be the Thomas Edison or Edwin Land of his generation.

Myhrvold, 44, left Microsoft three years ago, but he has lost none of his irrepressible enthusiasm for technology and its world-transforming potential. He is now managing director of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based entrepreneurial firm he cofounded three years ago with former Microsoft colleague Edward Jung. The partnership has launched projects in computer science, biotechnology, and intellectual property. But the one Myhrvold is most excited about, and is devoting most of his time to, is the project of reinventing invention.

Edison and Land are two of his touchstones. While Edison is best known for inventing the incandescent light bulb in the 1870s, and Land the self-developing camera in the 1940s, both men also drew other inventors into their orbits in Menlo Park, N.J., and Cambridge, respectively. And that, in turn, spawned a culture of invention.

Myhrvold, who was in town last week to keynote the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT, thinks the culture of invention has frayed in recent decades, partly because the Pentagon and other government agencies have backed away from longer-term projects. Most invention today emanates from a constellation of laboratories at universities like MIT or Stanford, where the primary mission is research and innovation, and at corporations like Microsoft or IBM, where the primary mission is improving software or computer design. Too often, he believes, today's research labs avoid big ideas and are confined by the commercial or academic interests of their sponsors.

"Invention introduces risks, unknowns," said Myhrvold, who is credited with many software breakthroughs. "Most engineers are paid not to invent but to do something else. Invention is a side effect . . . Invention is often a subversive activity inside a corporation. You can be a very successful tenured professor within MIT without ever inventing anything."

Myhrvold wants to try a new system for spurring invention. With other investors, he has established the Invention Science Fund and hired 10 "senior inventors," some working full time and others keeping their day jobs at university or consulting posts. One is Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology and the inventor of the DNA gene sequencer. Others, like Myhrvold and Jung, have backgrounds in computer science. The goal is to form a collective of inventors, some in the Seattle area and some elsewhere, and get them brainstorming. "I think there is a lot of opportunity in being cross-disciplinary," Myhrvold said in an interview.

For all the Internet era hyperbole, Myhrvold suggested the recent past has been a less fertile time for invention than the 19th century, when photography, motion pictures, telephones, and steam engines all came into being. But the current period holds the potential for greater advances because inventors will be able to harness exponential growth in technologies ranging from semiconductors to hard disks to communications bandwidth, he said.

While it will work in fields as diverse as energy, photonics, or even defense, Myhrvold said his group would patent and license its technologies rather than build products. Technical expertise in any of these fields is less important than an openness to cross-pollination, he said. "Being an inventor is a separate field from the technical knowledge," he said. "Sometimes a lack of knowledge in a field is an advantage, because you don't know what's impossible."

In Myhrvold's vision, inventors would tap into the magic of serendipity. He outlined that philosophy in broad terms in his keynote speech. Not everyone bought into his analysis.

Shalom Flank, principal at Global Works, a technology consulting firm in Falls Church, Va., marched to a microphone after Myhrvold's address and flatly declared, "You're wrong." Separating the process of invention from its real-world context is impossible, Flank contended. "Inventors just talking to each other isn't going to work," he said later. "They need contact with reality. The process needs really good grounding in how technology comes into being."

Myhrvold conceded he is bucking a sentiment that "you can't go to dessert first" -- that is, move directly to invention without getting caught up in the business problems of sponsors. But he's more than willing to give it a try.

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.