I have been having a bit of whizz around the Intellectual Ventures website and its blog IV Insights. In doing so I came across a post entitled IV by the Numbers. Among other things, it shares the following snippets:

• IV has raised more than $5 billion in capital since 2000.

• The firm has signed 30 licensing customers as strategic partners and generated more than $2 billion in licensing revenues

• It has built a portfolio of more than 35,000 IP assets – including 3,000 patents and applications generated internally.

• IV has spent $1.5 billion to acquire IP, including $400 million on buying patents from individual inventors.

• Since 2003, IV has evaluated 35,000 IP assets each year and closed over 1,600 acquisitions.

• Up to now, more than 400 universities, governments and institutions from various parts of the world have developed relationships with IV. More than 3,000 inventors from these organisations have sent the firm 10,000 invention ideas.

Of course, this is only the stuff that IV wants you to know, but I thought it interesting nevertheless.

However, there was one other stat that I have not listed because I did not understand it. It's this:

Our invention investments span more than 50 technology areas including information and computer technology, metamaterials, health technologies, materials lifecycle management, next generation cloud computing, future surgery solutions and new approaches to addressing the worldwide energy crisis. In fact, we were granted 1,293 patents in 2010, making us #13 compared to other companies on a list by the USPTO.

I looked at the list referred to in the paragraph above and could not find IV anywhere on it, although I did find an “Invention Science Fund I, LLC” that received 93 grants in 2010. I don’t know if that has anything to do with IV, but it sounds like it could have. Where the other 1,200 grants come from, though, I don’t know. It could be that there are other entities listed which may be owned by IV but whose names do not suggest any connection, or it could be that there are lots of IV subsidiaries which received under 40 grants in 2010, but which cumulatively get the firm to the magic number. I suppose it is also possible that IV is actually referring to a global number of grants – although if that is the case it could have been worded a lot better.

The other possibility, of course, is that the figure is not actually correct – but I would be very surprised if that were the case. Why bother to mention it if it is not accurate? More likely the grants have been shared between myriad IV subsidiaries that are not immediately recognisable as such. And that strikes me as a bit of a lost opportunity. IV clearly wants to be seen as a generator of inventions and a facilitator of innovation. Getting the Intellectual Venture’s name on as many grants as possible is one way – superficial as it may be – of sending out the message that it is more than an NPE. So why not do that?

UPDATE - I have received the following note from Kasey Halmagyi, Corporate Communications Manager at IV, clarifying everything:

First of all, apologies if our stat was confusing! To clarify, yes, IV was issued 1,293 US patents in 2010. Those include patents on inventions we developed as well as patents and patent applications that we purchased that granted in 2010. The reason you weren’t able to find them all in the USPTO database you were searching is that often times our patents are assigned to subsidiaries of IV. You’re also right in noting that patents assigned to the name “Invention Science Fund 1, LLC” are IV patents.

Sectors

Licensing, Patents, IP business

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