Inventing the future. To boost innovation, firm networks scholars. Intellectual Ventures LLC

Brainstorming in a swamp. Whipping up a blizzard of patent applications. And cutting a raft of business deals.

That’s the new strategy being field-tested by Nathan P. Myhrvold, the man formerly known as ”Microsoft’s Brain," who wants to revolutionize technology transfer and improve the quality of inventions flowing into the marketplace.

Myhrvold, the versatile founder of Microsoft Research, left Microsoft Corp. and the comforts of corporate technology development in 2000 to start Intellectual Ventures LLC, a firm whose core competency is pumping out ideas with the help of renowned scientists and inventors like Robert S. Langer of MIT and Dr. Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

Intellectual Ventures was created to spur the kind of long-term basic research projects that Myhrvold believes are being neglected in corporate research labs, which have moved toward customer-driven applied research. ”Invention just gets short shrift," he lamented in an interview.

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff

Full Story: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2006/04/03/inventing_the_future/