Nathan Myhrvold

 ( Academics Of The University Of Cambridge ) 

Myhrvold has described his goal for Intellectual Ventures as helping to create a market for patent-backed securities. Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures, March 2010 The company's business practices have caused controversy, however, with some deprecating the firm as a patent troll, accusing the company of stifling innovation by buying patents and then forcing inventors to license their ideas by means of litigation. Ira Glass, NPR, July 24, 2011 Myhrvold has publicly defended his firm's practices, arguing that they foster innovation by serving as a marketplace for intellectual property. He has noted that many of the largest companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Apple, and Facebook, have also bought large patent portfolios and used litigation to protect them, but he has criticized them as focusing too much on creating "tools or toys for rich people." Walt Mossberg interviewed Myhrvold about Intellectual Ventures' role as a "patent troll" during the 10th annual All Things Digital conference.

According to The New York Times, Intellectual Ventures at one point controlled nearly 70,000 intellectual property assets (patents and patents pending) that it has used to generate approximately $3 billion in revenues, primarily in the form of license fees from large corporations. The company responds that it has returned more than $500 million to individual inventors and most of the remaining revenues to its investors.

After the Science Museum in London successfully built the computing section of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine #2 in 1991, Myhrvold funded the construction of the output section, which performs both printing and stereotyping of calculated results. He also commissioned the construction of a second complete Difference Engine #2 for himself, which was on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, from May 10, 2008, to January 31, 2016, and currently resides in the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory. Difference Engine Leaves Computer History Museum, Mark Moack, Mountain View Voice, January 28, 2016

In research presented at scientific conferences and published in the astronomy journal Icarus, Myhrvold has been a vocal critic of procedures and results about asteroid diameters published by the NEOWISE team.Myhrvold, Nathan P. "An Empirical Examination of WISE/NEOWISE Asteroid Analyses and Results" Retrieved January 6, 2018.Myhrvold, Nathan P. "An Empirical Examination of the NEOWISE Results and Data Analysis" Retrieved January 6, 2018. A 2016 preprint of his work on the subject received wide press coverage prompting NASA to release a public statement defending their published research and pointing out the lack of peer review and methodological errors in Myhrvold's preprint. However, the preprint was published in the peer-reviewed literature in 2017 and Myhrvold subsequently published results for thousands of asteroids. The WISE team's response to Myhrvold's 2017 article did not settle the dispute but acknowledged clerical and software errors brought to light by Myhrvold's work. Others have reported potential issues with uncertainties in WISE measurements.