How can Paul Allen Help a Billion People?

A couple of days ago we were invited to the graduation ceremony of Singularity University (SU), a Google-Autodesk interdisciplinary program operating out of the NASA Ames base in Mountain View, CA (at the heart of Silicon Valley). SU’s mission is:”to educate and inspire leaders to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.”

This is SU’s second year running their summer program, attracting 80 students from 35 different countries. This year’s students spent the majority of the 10 week program dealing with the mission of creating a project that could positively impact the lives of a billion people in 10 years, by leveraging exponentially advancing technologies. Teams presented a host of business plans, in five project areas: Upcycle, Water, Energy, Food and Space. The project resulted in an incredible array of innovative ideas: from a company addressing the world’s hunger problems that would allow you to grow a tomato in your own kitchen overnight, to a company that addressing the world’s recycling problems by “upcycling” materials, in the same way that a nature’s food chain deals with waste. At the heart of all of these ideas lies a powerful concept of harnessing technologies that already exist (or that may be specifically developed in the future) and using them in a new and creative way to improve the lives of a billion people. That was the main and primary goal of each of the ventures created by the graduates.
We came out of that event truly awed and inspired…such a refreshing concept, reminding all of us why technologies are developed in the first place.It was ironic, then, that on the same day, I came home and read a WSJ story about Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, suing a host of companies over four patents:

A firm run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is suing Apple, Google and 9 other companies alleging they are violating patents Mr. Allen financed more than a decade ago…The 57-year-old software guru … sued much of Silicon Valley, claiming Internet giants such as Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and eBay Inc. have built their businesses around what he says is his technology. … Mr. Allen, a pioneer of computer software, didn't develop any of the technology himself but owns the patents. The four patents named in the suit were developed at Interval Research Corp., a Palo Alto, Calif., lab and technology incubator Mr. Allen financed with about $100 million during the Internet bubble, but which closed down about a decade ago….

Now, here’s a paragraph that specifically caught my eye in that story:

Mr. Allen's lawyers said a team has been reviewing his patent portfolio for years, seeing what's relevant to the current marketplace and parsing the technicalities necessary to complete the lengthy patent process. During that time, some patents were sold or licensed.

So here is a simple but powerful idea for Mr. Allen – instead of engaging in lengthy, expensive litigation, why don’t you bring your patents into the hands of a venture that could improve the lives of a billion people? One way of doing that would be to engage the same team of lawyers reviewing Interval Research Corp’s patent portfolio, and find the ones that can match some of the ventures that were conceived by the Singularity graduates. The patents could actually be licensed or sold to companies generating a significant amount of money out of them, and so this is not necessarily an act of charity; that being said, you still get the added bonus of helping a billion people eat, drink clean water, recycle their toxic waste and live a better life! Some food for thought…