Nathan Myhrvold said Thursday that his high-profile invention and patenting firm, Intellectual Ventures, has been enjoying a boom in licensing revenue recently, thanks to its trove of intellectual property.

During an evening appearance at The Wall Street Journal's ECO:nomics Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., Myhrvold--a former Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) executive--mentioned that Intellectual Ventures saw $700 million in licensing revenue last year.

An Intellectual Ventures spokeswoman confirmed the figure, and added that the firm's total licensing revenue to date amounts to roughly $2 billion. Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures was founded by Myhrvold in 2000.

Myhrvold's firm has drawn widespread attention for the quality of the thinkers who help it to conjure new concepts, and for its stockpiling of legally protected ideas. Intellectual Ventures boasts of having over 30,000 patents.

"Part of our idea is we don't create products," Myhrvold said on Thursday, likening his firm to an advertising agency or law firm that provides brain power but doesn't necessarily make anything.

"I'd like to channel billions of dollars into funding new inventions," Myhrvold said, before pausing and then adding he's actually already achieving that goal. Intellectual Ventures has raised over $5 billion from backers.

While boosting its licensing revenue of late, Intellectual Ventures has also begun to attempt to enforce its intellectual property rights in court.

In December, Intellectual Ventures filed lawsuits against nine different technology firms, including Symantec Corp. (SYMC) and Trend Micro Inc. (TMICY) Intellectual Ventures alleged that the firms chose "to ignore our requests for good-faith negotiations and discussions" about licensing agreements.

One exception to Intellectual Ventures' focus on crafting legally protected ideas and not companies has been TerraPower LLC, a developer of nuclear-reactor technology spawned by the firm.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates serves as chairman at TerraPower, which has also drawn investment from venture capitalists, including Vinod Khosla.

Myhrvold, who served as chief technology officer at Microsoft, said of TerraPower: "In this case, we created our own nuclear reactor company because, for this idea to be taken seriously, tens of millions of dollars of additional engineering work needed to be done."

TerraPower is developing reactors that can theoretically run for extended periods on depleted uranium, rather than depending on regular doses of enriched uranium.

-John Letzing; 415-439-6400; AskNewswires@dowjones.com

 
 
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