Knowing and Making

[ I intended my next post to be a followup to yesterday's, but I need a bit more time to work on that. So you can have this one instead - it's quite good too ] Only someone with Nathan Myhrvold's Microsoft money - and reputation as a mad genius - could get away with starting Intellectual Ventures and still being taken seriously. But since he can, it makes it an interesting concept. This article by Ryan McClafferty  raises some tricky questions about whether the company's attempts to create a marketplace in ideas will encourage, or instead stifle, innovation. Normally if we deepen the market for a commodity, more of it will be produced. It gives producers more chances to sell, consumers more places to buy and lets price discovery be more accurate. As a side-effect it will usually improve the quality of the good - imagine that instead of a competitive dealer network for buying and selling cars, the government simply issued one to every family. It's very unlikely...