IV and Microsoft together...hmmm....wouldn't surprise me a bit if some of our bashers over the years came from this joint effort...since MSFT is known for its FUD tactics.

Patent Trolling (50% allocation)
Patent Trolling is a derogatory description for firms which typically acquire patents and use them to extort money from legitimate businesses by suing or threatening to sue. The largest patent troll is run by Intellectual Ventures. Press accounts have estimated that the firm has gathered some 3,000 to 5,000 patents, an order of magnitude greater than that of any other purported troll. Microsoft has funded Intellectual Ventures of up to $76 million. The realism of exercising legal patent rights was recently demonstrated between Research in Motion (manufacturer of the BlackBerry) and NTP, which led to a $612 million settlement. Closer to nanotechnology, Harvard recently licensed more than 50 current and pending patents to Nano-Terra that includes patents covering various nanotechnology such as soft lithograph which could potentially be used to make next generation microchips. Similar patent rich nanotech startups include Nanosys, Molecular Imprints, Nantero and Zyvex. Given the mass of dormant patents sitting in Universities, I would establish a firm that sifts through University patents and obtains exclusivity in niche high growth technologies such as nanopatterning (44% growth), solar cells (30% growth), CMOS image sensors (13% growth) and other fundamental inventions based on physical limits to nanoscaling such as phonon engineering and high mobility planar devices. Doing so, I would then contract or recruit seasoned marketers to aggressively license the IP.