After his Churchill Club chat with Forbes Magazine's Sr. Editor, Elizabeth Corcoran, I sat down with Nathan Myhrvold to talk about his latest company. Intellectual Ventures started in 2000 and is likened to a private equity firm but for inventions. "We create our own inventions [the company employs 180+ people] but also invest in others", he said. After 7 years in the making, 800 filed patents but only 15-20 granted, the former Microsoft CTO is looking to publicly launch some of its innovations/inventions this year. With Intellectual Ventures, Ocean Tomo and the Patent Board, are some of the other companies trying to profit from inventions and more broadly, intellectual property (patents, copyrights....). "There are lots of assets tied up at companies or universities that need to find an outlet. It could be us, or a later stage venture capital firm, licensing houses or perhaps in the future, a Kleiner Perkins or a Goldman Sachs", concluded Peter Detkin, Intellectual Ventures co-founder.

Here are a few quotes taken from our conversation:

At Microsoft, I created a research lab and I wanted to do something like that all over again. I looked at doing conventional capital investing and other things and I thought it would be more interesting to do a brand new model.

Most of the Silicon Valley companies invest in the 'D' or R&D and don't invest in research like IBM, Microsoft or HP do. At Microsoft Research the primary output of the 600 researchers is research not products. Oracle has no research lab like that, same for Sun or Apple.

Research labs are out there trying to develop brand new technologies, not refining existing stuff or developing incremental products. That activity is something that is the source of all technologies, yet society put little effort into it.

And I always believe that research and R&D is a great investment but there's no way to make that investment directly until now.

Most of people think of research as a charity, a philantropic thing. They don't view it as a for-profit venture. So our goal is to make research something you can invest in.

I think it's a valuable investment if you know what you're doing. So we think that if we supply capital and expertise in the right way then we can make a hell of an investment and if we are successful at doing it, the net research budget will go up.

Our investors hope that we'll be able to create the same kinds of returns than a venture firm or a private equity firm!