High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Intellectual Ventures is a private company notable for being one of the top-five owners of U.S. patents, as of 2011. Its business model has a focus on developing a large patent portfolio and licensing these patents to companies. Publicly, it states that a major goal is to assist small inventors against corporations. In practice, much of their revenue comes from licensing patents from other corporations and then filing lawsuits for infringement of patents, a controversial practice known as patent trolling.