Malcolm Gladwell: Who says big ideas are rare?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

by danohuiginn • 18 years ago

69 26 18 years ago

rml• 18 years ago

Was anyone else slightly perturbed by this article? The existence of well-funded and -connected companies like Intellectual Ventures, and their obvious influence over the authors such as Mr. Gladwell that serve to glorify them to the reading public, is rather frightening to me. As far as I can tell, they do not make a single product, nor do they provide a single service. Instead, they charge others for the right to use "their" ideas.

It sends a bit of a chill down my spine -- I'm trying to imagine what my copy of Kleppner & Ramsey's 'Quick Calculus' (about a $20 book) would have cost if Newton had 'patented' Calculus, and if his (hypothetical, avaricious) descendants and their attorneys had insisted on their 'right' to a cut of the profits.

lapenne• 18 years ago

I am not sure. I got the impression they'll be pursuing those ideas (as in the case of the cancer-filter product), not just charging companies to use their patents.

The article was pretty inspiring, knowing not everyone is just interested in making yet another social website or a twitter clone, but something that can really substantially change people's lives.

prakash• 18 years ago

I am. While their motives and intentions seem genuine, the fact that they have to patent all this seems scary.

daniel-cussen• 18 years ago

Has anyone heard of a case where someone needs an idea and turns to Intellectual Ventures to buy one? I'm referring to the way people make this kind of arrangement with universities. If someone has, then Intellectual Ventures could legitimately claim to be innovative.

mechanical_fish3• 18 years ago

Has anyone heard of a case where someone needs an idea and turns to Intellectual Ventures to buy one?

That's an easy one: The Department of Defense. A great deal of the DARPA budget is dedicated to paying companies like Intellectual Ventures, or their partners, to develop one or another of their ideas into some military technology. Moreover, companies like Intellectual Ventures would not exist if it wasn't for the fact that -- unlike consumers -- the U.S. Government is often happy to pay for ideas that have no successful implementation, and may never have one.

Do you think it's a coincidence that one of Intellectual Ventures' key employees is a former Star Wars researcher? Do you think it's a coincidence that one of their brainstorms was a way to prevent post-injury strokes in soldiers? Companies like this one don't brainstorm at random; they think towards the money, just as a plant grows toward sunlight.

It's not all military, of course: The NIH and the NSF are also good for pure-research money.

mechanical_fish3• 18 years ago

Remember that, unlike modern copyright and all trademarks, patents still expire. You get 17 to 20 years. If Newton had patented calculus... the patent would have expired centuries ago.

So let's try an alternative view of Intellectual Ventures: They perform the valuable service of donating piles and piles of inventions to the world's stock of prior art. Each donation takes twenty years to mature, of course, but after that it's available to be developed into a product without any patent worries, because the patent will have already been filed and allowed to expire. If one of their ideas looks particularly great and you don't want to have to wait twenty years, you can get an early start just by paying them a royalty.

This, of course, is the original purpose and spirit of the patent laws. And, though patents are broken in various ways right now, that purpose is still alive -- especially relative to the terrible situation with copyright law, which is nigh-100% broken thanks to the Disney Corporation and its pet lawmakers.

dissenter• 18 years ago

There are two common ways to justify patents:

1. They help the public by encouraging inventors to publicly document their inventions

2. They protect and encourage inventors by giving them control over intellectual property

You've taken Position 1, which I find to be a very weak argument in favor of patents.

The world owes a great debt to Einstein and Godel, for relativity and incompleteness, but it is widely recognized that without them the same results would still have been achieved only a few years later. That's the way science works. It progresses along a linear track, and the best minds are only a few years, and more often a few months, ahead of the pack. The literature is rife with examples, but here are a few more good ones to chew on: Newton-Leibniz, Cook-Levin, Knuth–Morris–Pratt, Williamson-Diffie-Hellman, and Cocks-Rivest-Shamir-Adleman.

Though Williamson and Cocks are special cases because of the secrecy granted to government institutions, the point is clear: it is almost certain someone else would've arrived at the same ideas around the same time. Ideas are precipitated by conditions. These citations make this explicit with conflicting dates. You usually don't get this type of evidence because you usually don't get to publish the same idea twice.

For Position 1 to make any sense, it would have to take me longer than 20 years to reverse engineer your idea. Most patentable ideas could be reverse engineered in a day, and more to the point, most patentable 'flashes of genius' are repeated by other people in a vacuum, that is, without any knowledge of the original. Conditions are such that nowadays most people have the same idea within weeks of each other.

With an environment like that, patents are not working to bring new ideas to the public. The public is already having these ideas. What the patent is doing is preventing competitors from entering the market, when competition is almost universally good for the public. You can make the argument that the patent serves the interest of the patenter, and that would be true, but any argument that makes the claim that patents support the public---except in the circuitous way that they help inventors---is specious at best.

I know a lot of people who've dealt with the patent system (software). I'm in the process of filing two myself. I don't know anyone who looks at the patent database as a 'treasure trove' of ideas they can put to use. Most people think of it as a 'minefield' of ideas that are already taken. The patent database is boring, and all of its contents are written specifically to hold up in court battles, not to explain ideas to people who might put them to use. That's a pretty good empirical argument that the patent system is not working according to the guidelines in Position 1.

You take a very sympathetic view of Intellectual Ventures, but to me they don't look like a particularly benevolent company. If they're so intent on licensing new inventions to the public, why isn't there any link to their inventions on their website? Why aren't they pushing a product? There isn't even a basic search link to the USPTO that fills in their name in the assignee field.

The fact that this company raised "hundreds of millions of dollars" indicates to me that a lot of very intelligent people view this as a very profitable field. It is worth keeping in mind that Intellectual Ventures, as a company, aims to produce no product. They only seek to amass a portfolio of rights granted by the US Government to seek injunctions against others using ideas to which they've laid claim.

Now I suppose it is possible that Intellectual Ventures could come up with useful inventions and license them to the public at a fair price, but that is not the impression I get in their case. It seems to me that, their contributions to national defense notwithstanding, they've created a humongous patent troll, and that they intend to front-run intellectual development in this country. They only have to pay a stable of experts to stay a few months ahead of the state of the art, and they don't have to pay a dime for product development. Whether or not they turn into a patent troll, this is in fact what they are incentivized by the market to do. Companies with unregulated, government-granted monopolies rarely charge fair rates for their services.

Public understanding will almost certainly be advanced short-term by Intellectual Ventures, but the question is whether they are deserving of this money, producing no product themselves, and whether they won't harm us in the long run by stymieing the progress of someone who might. Remember, without the protections of patent law, this company wouldn't exist. My concern is not with the people who start a company like Intellectual Ventures, but with the patent laws that make it so enticing for a company like Intellectual Ventures to behave in a counterproductive way.

fallentimes• 18 years ago

It's not the big ideas that are rare - it's the execution/implementation.

dangoldin2• 18 years ago

I'm surprised that we are able to get articles that are future dated.

It's not even May 12th yet but I get to read the articles now - now that's a discovery!

cdr• 18 years ago

You must not read magazines (the dead-tree type) much.

dangoldin2• 18 years ago

I used to but I've moved on to the wonderful world of the internet.

At least I never bothered with TV.

KrisJordan• 18 years ago

My key take away from this article is that, for the most part, good ideas are a commodity and great ideas are rarely uniquely arrived at. This is one of the reasons VCs will never sign NDAs, because if they haven't already seen the same idea you're pitching from someone else, they most likely will soon. Just about every source I've read says that success is rarely the idea and most often the people behind it. Ideas are a commodity.

It's a lot like playing billiards. Given the same set of circumstances on a table and a number of players pondering the same problem,"where should I hit the cue ball?", it is very likely that two players come to derive the same idea. Whether or not the player can make the shot, that's a matter of talent, practice, and a little bit of luck. Until you've reached a certain level it's your ability to make the shots you dream up, not your ability to dream up shots, that will determine whether you win or lose.

pchristensen2• 18 years ago

"where should I hit the cue ball?"

Immediate entry into my book of useful analogies! Thanks!

scott_s• 18 years ago

The article suggests that geniuses may just be more efficient discoverers than the "average" researcher. The example is that Kelvin had 32 multiple discoveries, so the implication is that Kelvin is equal to the sum of those 32 people.

Maybe there's something to this. But I have to wonder if certain discoveries really do require a genius, and not just someone who is good. That is, is a genius more than just the sum of his lessers?

What pops into mind is special and general relativity. In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a physicist says that special relativity was an idea whose time had come. If Einstein hadn't discovered and published it, someone else would have. But he followed that up with if Einstein hadn't come up with general relativity, we'd still be waiting for it.

Going back to Newton, calculus was a multiple, but as far as I know, his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation are not.

DaniFong• 18 years ago

Intellectual Ventures sounds like dinner in grad school

TrevorJ• 18 years ago

Well well worth the read, thank you.

DmitriLebedev• 18 years ago

The article sounds doubtful: the smart guys gathered and invented something, but, as I understand (having jumped paragraphs to save time), they only patented their ideas, neither evaluating, nor testing any of them. This may lead to making a set of useless patents that nobody will ever try to use.

Imagine that instead of YC there were a "think tank", a gathering of people who would invent websites or startups and then just document the ideas. This can be much more entertaining and may seem a deeper thought than advising on and evaluating the "materialized" projects. But how many projects, that sound nice, will ever be done, and how successful can they be?

bkovitz2• 18 years ago

I would love to read what such a think tank comes up with. Right now my brain is fried for coming up with business ideas, but groovin' on doing implementation work. If I knew of a small web-site idea that had a really good shot at making money by subscription, I would blast it out immediately. Then my rent would be paid for when I go to grad school this Fall. :)

Malcolm Gladwell: Who says big ideas are rare?

Related Stories