I always look out for pieces written by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, who was noted the other day in the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s leading business pundits. They tend to be intriguing, clever, full of great anecdotes and thoroughly enjoyable.

He is also, of course, the author of the best-sellers The Tipping Point, and Blink, which are both wonderful reads.

All the same, Gladwell has come under some scrutiny for allegedly, how to put this, making the best of his stories. That is to say, contriving that his evidence fits his latest all-encompassing theory a little too neatly.

He got a bit of stick for his, as he phrased it, “semi-defence” of Enron and its chief executive Jeff Skilling on the grounds that Skilling did not hide what he was doing from plain view. It was more that outsiders failed to notice.

More recently, Gladwell’s re-telling of an old anecdote about how he used to sneak odd phrases into the Washington Post for a lark has been rather undermined by a rigorous search of the cuttings that found no such thing. In that case, he admitted that it might have been a bit of a tall tale.

Anyway, Gladwell’s latest piece has just appeared on the subject of innovation and how new inventions come about. It is centred on Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft executive who now runs Intellectual Ventures, a business aimed at discovering new ideas and patenting them.

Clearly, Mr Myhrvold is an intriguing figure in his own right and Gladwell uses him to posit the notion that invention - of the scientific rather than artistic kind - need not come from a single genius coming up with an idea on his own. Instead, it can just as easily emerge from a group of intelligent people working hard.

As he puts it in the nut paragraph of the piece:

Ideas weren’t precious. They were everywhere, which suggested that maybe the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for invention—genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany—wasn’t necessary at all.

Gladwell produces a lot of colourful evidence for this - in particular the history of past inventions often having been thought up by several people separately at the same time. It is as if science or technology advances sufficiently that a notion is hanging around waiting to be discovered.

He does not say this it but it has implications for companies such as Google, which try to remain innovative by allowing engineers to work on new ideas in their spare time. If what Gladwell says is true, then the chances of Google coming up with other big ideas to match search technology are high.

However, I was left with a couple of lingering doubts.

First, Gladwell skips over the main criticism of Intellectual Ventures - that it is a patent troll that operates by coming up with ideas and then registering them to block others in the field. He reports the following fact:

The original expectation was that IV would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas.

Well, yes but a track record in filing patents is not equivalent to being inventive. 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.

It could just have been that HP had become better at working the patent system and I wonder whether the same might be said of Intellectual Ventures.

Second, what about the link between discovery and development? Mr Mhryvold dismisses as “a fool’s game” trying to predict which of these inventions will turn out to be successful. Actually, I will venture a guess: it will be the smaller ones, rather than the big, glamorous, impractical ones.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and an investor in IV, is quoted in the piece about one of IV’s notions:

They also came up with this idea to stop hurricanes. Basically, the waves in the ocean have energy, and you use that to lower the temperature differential. I’m not saying it necessarily is going to work. But it’s just an example of something where you go, Wow.

Wow indeed. But if it does not actually work, then I would suggest that it does not count as an invention. Even I can come up with big ideas that don’t work. I might even be able to patent a few.

My point is that research and development are usually referred to in one phrase because one is useless without the other. Mr Mhryvold is tilting the playing field hugely in his direction (with Gladwell’s approval) by ignoring the development part. That is when the wheat is sorted from the chaff.

Ask, for example, a pharmaceuticals company, how many new molecules it can come up with in its labs and how many actual drugs emerge at the end of the clinical trials. One figure is very high and the other is painfully low.

May 8th, 2008 in Technology | Permalink