I read an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker today about Nathan Myhrvold, former director of research at Microsoft, and his “Intellectual Ventures” endeavor. Their whole idea is to be a company that comes up with good ideas, patent them, and license to interested companies that have the technical expertise. As I was reading about what Intellectual Ventures has gotten itself into, I couldn’t help but think that this is precisely the sort of thing we’re looking to foster here at NASA with the innovation and collaboration initiatives.

Intellectual Ventures sponsors huge brainstorming sessions where the key people in the company bring in subject matter experts who can help them figure out which ideas will work and which won’t. Importantly, though, they understand that the vast majority of their ideas probably won’t go anywhere, but that’s okay because it will help them learn and eventually get them to an idea that will work.

There were drawbacks to this approach, of course. The outsider, not knowing what the insider knew, would make a lot of mistakes and chase down a lot of rabbit holes. Myhrvold admits that many of the ideas that come out of the invention sessions come to naught. After a session, the Ph.D.s on the I.V. staff examine each proposal closely and decide which ones are worth pursuing. They talk to outside experts; they reread the literature.

Several quotes really stand out to me, in particular. Emphasis added.

One of the sessions that Gates participated in was on the possibility of resuscitating nuclear energy. “Teller had this idea way back when that you could make a very safe, passive nuclear reactor,” Myhrvold explained. “No moving parts. Proliferation-resistant. Dead simple. Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether. Lowell and Rod and others wrote a paper on it once. So we did several sessions on it.”

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It was a long-shot idea, easily fifteen years from reality, if it became a reality at all. It was just a tantalizing idea at this point, but who wasn’t interested in seeing where it would lead? “We have thirty guys working on it,” he went on. “I have more people doing cutting-edge nuclear work than General Electric.”

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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.

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Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them, which is how a group of people can sit down to dinner, put their minds to it, and end up with eight single-spaced pages of ideas.

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Insight could be orchestrated: that was the lesson. If someone who knew how to make a filter had a conversation with someone who knew a lot about cancer and with someone who read the medical literature like a physicist, then maybe you could come up with a cancer treatment.

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You could put together an Intellectual Ventures in Los Angeles, if you wanted to, and Chicago, and New York and Baltimore, and anywhere you could find enough imagination, a fresh set of eyes, and a room full of Varleys and Pfaffs.

The Virtual Collaboration Center and the Innovation Sphere proposed in the 20-Year JSC Vision are precisely the kind of operational environments we can use to foster such a process in NASA. In fact, the parallels between those two ideas in the Vision and the brainstorming lab at Intellectual Ventures were blindly obvious as I read Gladwell’s article… which completely ties into his point about a multiplicity of ideas and processes! This statement is going to prove me for the geek that I am, but it really is beautiful to see the connections.