Ron Martinez is founder and principal of Invention Arts, LLC, an invention, product development, and consulting firm focused on the evolution of media, commerce, and intellectual property. He splits his time between San Francisco, Paris, and the Périgord region of southwest France, near Bordeaux.

Recent work includes his role as Advisor to the Content Blockchain Project, as well as the invention and development of the Aerio Retail Network, a decentralized e-commerce marketplace delivering “retail-as-a-service” to suppliers, sellers, and consumers. Aerio was acquired by Ingram Content Group in 2016.

Prior to Invention Arts, Ron served for four years as global Vice President, Intellectual Property Innovation for Yahoo!, where he drove and managed the development of hundreds of defensive patent applications and resulting product innovations. At Yahoo! he was also responsible for Content IP Strategy and Operations, designing and implementing a global “rights engine” to make content rights machine-readable, speeding development of new products and services while ensuring attribution and compensation to creators.

Ron currently holds more than sixty issued patents covering a range of increasingly interconnected fields that includes media, mobile, social, and commerce. His focus in intellectual property is to help inoculate meaningful innovations against privatization detrimental to the dissemination of knowledge and culture, while supporting the development of new products and markets, particularly in the field of decentralized commerce and evolving media forms.

As a creator, Ron has written, designed, and coded numerous story-centric experiences, including interactive fiction (as one of its earliest practitioners), graphic adventures, algorithmic story generators, realtime massively multiplayer games, pathway books, and political simulations, and even a flying saucer simulator. In the past he’s served on the boards of Zeum and Film Arts Foundation, both located in San Francisco.