Edward Jung
Edward has been passionate about innovation since childhood, with a belief that innovation is the key to solving the problems of humanity. His first inventions were in electric field-based biomedical particle sizing and Fourier Transform IR spectroscopy when he was a teenage lab rat. Since then, he has tried nearly every approach to innovation, with “careers” in academic research science, startup serial entrepreneurship, multinational R&D executive management, global fund management, innovation advisor, and as an inventor. Through that experience, Edward learned much about the inefficiencies of innovation around the world, and now is at Rhizome Network applying these hard lessons toward making a better system for global innovation.
Edward’s vision quest has taken him to many places. He is one of the world’s top 12 inventors by patent count, having over 1200 issued patents in fields ranging from social media and energy to materials science and healthcare technology, licensed by hundreds of startups and multinationals around the world. He was Founder at Intellectual Ventures, the largest invention fund in history, as President growing it to $7B assets under management, 1000 employees in 11 countries, and $980M in revenues, and as CTO expanding the fund innovation network to over 100 countries and 100 universities, and delivering over a dozen spinout companies. Edward was Chief Architect at Microsoft in the 1990’s managing internal R&D strategy and helping start dozens of product groups as well as Microsoft Research, and also was at NeXT and Apple Computer. Edward has been founding CEO at a half dozen startups starting in 1980, and an innovation advisor to many organizations including Harvard Medical School, Fred Hutchinson, National Academy of Sciences, China Academy of Sciences, US Council on Competitiveness, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Edward’s published academic research in protein structure-function in the 1980’s in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Biochemistry, and Biophysical Journal, among others, leveraging his training in mathematical physics and biophysics.
Edward enjoys traveling all over the world and loves to leverage his diverse experiences to organize solutions to difficult problems.