In 2009, Intellectual Ventures launched a prototyping and research laboratory called Intellectual Ventures Lab, hiring prominent scientists to imagine inventions which could exist but do not yet exist, and then filing descriptions of these inventions with the US Patent Office.
Lowell Wood, an "inventor in residence" at Intellectual Ventures, became the most-patented inventor in US history in 2015, breaking the record held by Thomas Edison for over 80 years.