Edward Jung Calls for New Large-Scale Innovation Model

Edward Jung thinks the world needs a new model of innovation to tackle today’s large-scale challenges like building efficient cities and caring for an aging population. The chief technology officer of Innovative Ventures (IV) knows something about innovation, not only because IV is one of the world’s top five patent holders but because Jung himself has an impressive resume as an inventor and a technology executive at some of Silicon Valley’s leading firms.

IV has been called a patent troll because it makes the bulk of its revenues by licensing or buying up patents from leading software firms like Apple, Adobe, Microsoft and Google, then filing infringement suits against rivals. In virtually every case the defendants settle the suits by either paying hefty licensing fees or end up giving up licenses of their own patents to IV and its partners.

But Jung sees IV’s role in a benign, even noble light. Not only is it providing income for thousands of individual inventors and small firms, he says, but it has acquired the capability to serve a useful oversight and coordination role in an age when large-scale problems will need to be tackled by the efficient coordination of thousands of closely coordinated inventions and innovations.

“The world has gotten very good at building smaller solutions,” Jung told Technology Review. “The startup economy solves targeted problems very ably. And we’ve seen programs like X Prize and other kinds of prize-based schemes try to solve problems at a somewhat larger scale. But a lot of the problems we’re looking at now vastly exceed the abilities of single companies.”

IV knows about scale. In the 12 years since it was co-founded by Jung and former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, it has amassed over 35,000 patents, including 3,000 it developed through its own effort at directing the work of inventors and investing in startups. It has spent $1.5 billion buying patents and used them to generate over $2 billion in licensing revenues.

What Jung is conceiving as the next logical step for the technology industry is a ”collaborative, context-based” innovation economy in which a sort of lead architect does the coordinating work of breaking down massive projects into pieces and assigning them to various players.

“So, for example, if you wanted to launch a mission to the moon, the mechanism you don’t use is to say: ‘Oh, well, let’s just assume a whole bunch of startups will show up and one of them will build the command module, and one of them will build the rocket, and one of them will build this or that’ —and imagine they will all magically integrate and you’ll get this system that’s going to go to the moon,” said Jung. “You have to go at it from the top down. To do that on a large scale—say, for something like a health-care system or energy infrastructure—is very rare.”

He cites the aerospace industry as a working model of such top-down innovation.

“What Boeing does to produce the 787 is coördinate the output of thousands of companies. They don’t produce all of the pieces. They produce the big architectural spec, and they guarantee the financing. And that allows all of those innovative companies underneath Boeing to create new kinds of tire rubber, or new forms of engines, or composite materials. They know if they satisfy the architectural spec they’ll get the business.”

Jung envisions IV playing that coordinating role in a projects like building megacities for the billions who will be moving from countrysides to cities over the next few decades.

“We believe that this is an opportunity for tremendous amounts of new innovation, because each city is essentially an economic infrastructure for innovation,” said Jung. “Building a city around new innovations would reduce the cost of deploying innovations and increase the demand for innovations. Our belief is that if you design a city slightly differently, you can make it as easy to plug new stuff in and unplug old stuff as it is to buy apps in the Apple App Store.”

Another problem for which Jung sees a role for a firm like IV is that of an aging population. The two facets of the problem are the rising cost of caring for the aged and the shrinking population of productive workers to pay for the rising cost of healthcare.

“To address both pieces, we have a project we call ‘Wisdom Economy’ which is a very grand architecture for an innovation economy that, on the one hand, improves the productivity of the dwindling work force of young people as well as the productivity (including the social contributions) of the aging and, on the other hand, creates a platform for diagnostic and therapeutic medicine that induces more innovation and shifts the emphasis from acute care to chronic care.”

Healthcare was a large-scale problem Jung had been thinking about from IV’s inception.

“I was interested in the problems of developed-world healthcare and how we’re going to avoid healthcare systems becoming bankrupt,” he recalled. “So, to get funding, Nathan and I began selling our brains.”

Before co-founding IV in July of 1999 Edward Jung was chief architect and advisor to executive staff at Microsoft. During his 10 years at Microsoft Jung managed projects relating to Web platforms, semantic web technology, intelligent operating systems, adaptive user interfaces and artificial intelligence. Before joining Microsoft in February 1990, Jung ran the Deep Thought Group, working on neural network chips for learning and parallel computation. He also consulted to and wrote software for NeXT Computer, Apple Computer and its Advanced Technology Group, and the Open Software Foundation.

Jung is himself a prolific inventor who holds more than 200 patents worldwide and has more than 1000 patents pending. His cover a wide range of fields including biomedical research instruments, neural networks, object technology, distributed operating systems and semantic data analysis. His biomedical research work in protein structure and function has been published in several journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Biochemistry.

Jung also serves as a strategic advisor to Harvard Medical School, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Institute for Systems Biology. His non-profit work includes consulting to the Asia Pacific Federation, the Aspen Institute, the China Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization.

Edward Jung was born to Korean immigrant parents about 48 years ago in upstate New York.