Create Your Own Genius Factory

I want all the companies I work with (and all of you guys, of course!) to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating piece about scientific progress and Nathan Myhrvold’s company Intellectual Ventures. IV's success can be read as an incredibly inspiring example of how group problem solving spurs innovation – which is exactly why my consulting company trains companies around the world to do it.

Gladwell describes IV this way:

“In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.”

Myhrvold hoped Intellectual Ventures would file 100 patents a year. Instead they’re filing 500 patents per year, “with a blacklog of 3000 ideas.” As Bill Gates puts it in the piece, “I can give you fifty examples of ideas they’ve had where, if you take just one of them, you’d have a startup company right there.” (Even though Gates is a major investor, i.e. biased, I hear he’s had some small success in business so I’ll trust him.)

You might be thinking, “It worked because they were geniuses.” I'm sure that didn't hurt, but there was still some magic that came out of putting them together -- ideas flourished beyond all expectation. Malcolm writes:

“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.” 

Although Gladwell's more interested in the idea of multiplicity in scientific progress than group problem solving per se, it's clearly part of the IV phenomenon. Working in groups takes us farther, faster – having others to push us helps us close out blind alleys and move past false assumptions. Stay tuned for a possible upcoming Tip of the Week on some tools to make group problem solving as effective and productive as possible.

My consultants often find that companies give up on group problem solving before it can be successful because they haven't put the right foundation and process into place to reap the rewards. So how about you, what's your feeling on group problem solving? Like it? Hate it? Speak.