R. Rigby Email Address

Director, Post Grant Proceedings

Intellectual Ventures is an invention company ... Invention represents an integral and vital part of the commercial food chain. Invention leads to product design, which in turn leads to product development, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and service. While companies around the world choose to specialize in different parts of the food chain, very few companies do it all and even fewer do it all well. Our personal interests lie in invention. We believe that by focusing on invention, and nothing but invention, we can do it better than the product design and product development companies who are closest to us in the food chain. Product companies are far more worried about their 2-3 year product design and development cycles or transferring products to manufacturing than thinking about the next great invention. And when they do think about inventions, they usually constrain themselves to their relatively narrow focus areas. Our idea of focusing exclusively on invention isn,t new. In the 1800,s the census bureau had a job category of inventor and inventors have brought society some of the many things we depend on - where would we be without the work of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein. At Intellectual Ventures, we are empowering the next generation of Bells and Einsteins by highlighting the business of invention and providing a means for inventors to be fairly compensated for their work. We conceive and patent our own inventions in-house ... Intellectual Ventures is a source of innovation for the market. Because we are not constrained by near term product cycles and near term product budgets, we have the freedom to work on technology breakthroughs that may be years away from commercialization. This freedom lets us stretch the bounds of technology and make advancements well before product companies would get to them. With the advancements done for them, however, product companies can incorporate our inventions sooner than they would have otherwise. This is a fun, exciting, and intellectually rewarding part of our business. Even though the commercialization of these inventions may be many years out, we view this as a long term market opportunity and strategy.