Innventure's VP of Business Development, Gayle Anderson, delivered the opening keynote at the Licensing Executives Society Silicon Valley Chapter's Annual Conference at the Computer History Museum. Here are the key insights she shared about our model for commercializing breakthrough technologies.
The Innovation Paradox at the Computer History Museum
Visitors to the Computer History Museum often ask: what was the first computer?
The answer is far from simple.
What counts as 'first' depends on how you define the problem.
The history of technology is rarely about a single moment or a lone inventor. It's about a series of breakthroughs, each building on the last, often in parallel, and often with multiple uses in mind."
This observation frames a critical question about innovation itself: What makes an innovation successful? Is it the brilliance of the idea? The timing of its introduction? Or perhaps something else entirely—like finding the right pathway to market?
The truth is startling: approximately 70% of potentially transformative technologies developed within multinational corporations never reach the market. These groundbreaking technologies sit dormant—not because they lack potential, but because they've never found their pathway to the world.
The Hidden Innovation Crisis
Let's go back to 2015.
A brilliant scientist at Procter & Gamble had developed a revolutionary technology for recycling polypropylene—one of the most common yet difficult-to-recycle plastics in our world. This wasn't just an incremental improvement; it was transformative. It could convert low-value, often landfill-bound plastic into material nearly identical to virgin plastic.
But there was a problem. While P&G recognized the technology's potential, they aren't in the recycling business.
*Remember: Just because a technology IMPACTS your business does NOT mean it SHOULD BECOME your business.*
As Dr. John Layman, the inventor, explained: "If you look at P&G today, we're not a vertically integrated supplier. We don't make our own plastics. We generally buy those and then partner with converters to actually make plastic articles for products or packaging."
P&G knew from day one that if successful, they would need an external partner to bring this technology to life. Despite its enormous potential impact, it simply wasn't aligned with their core business.
... And this is the dilemma many innovative companies face.
That breakthrough, risked becoming like the Babbage Engine: a brilliant innovation trapped in limbo.
The Babbage Engine — as some of you may know — is a mechanical computer designed in the 1800s but was not actually built until 2002—it was a groundbreaking innovation that waited over 153 years until it found its path to reality.
So, how can you ensure your most promising innovations don't have to wait 153 years to reach the market and make a meaningful impact?
Invention is not just about being first—it is about creating impact through flexibility and adaptability.... a catalyst for transformation.
The Traditional Innovation Pathways
When companies develop promising technologies outside their core focus, they've traditionally faced limited options:
- Try to commercialize it themselves, despite it not being their core business
- Find another large company to license or acquire it
- Work with traditional venture capital that accepts a high failure rate
- Let the inventor leave to create a startup, potentially losing control and future value
- Simply shelve the technology — wasting both the investment and the potential impact
Many of you have likely considered or navigated these paths firsthand.
You know the limitations. You've felt the frustration.
As IP licensing executives know all too well, each pathway has significant limitations that can leave transformative technologies unrealized—not because they lack value, but because they lack a pathway to market.
A Different Approach: Creating New Bridges
The question Innventure’s model was inspired by: WHAT IF there was a better way?
A path that doesn't force talented innovators to choose between their corporate home and seeing their technological vision?
That's where our model creates value.
We don't just take technologies to market—we build bridges between corporate innovation and entrepreneurial execution.
We actually arranged for Dr. John Layman, the brilliant P&G scientist who invented the polypropylene recycling technology, to work directly with us, creating a knowledge transfer that preserved the deep technical understanding while bringing in industry experts.
This arrangement gave him the opportunity to guide his innovation's journey while maintaining his connection to P&G.
P&G had searched globally for recycled polypropylene solutions and found nothing that met their standards. As Dr. John Layman explained, "With 8,000 technologists and deep expertise in cleaning, we asked ourselves: Can we put our powers of cleaning to work on cleaning recycled resins?"
What started as a small investment with minimal time commitment grew as they hit milestone after milestone. They discovered they could take even the dirtiest polypropylene and transform it into material nearly identical to virgin plastic.
This is where Innventure entered the picture with a novel approach to commercialization that preserves corporate connection while enabling entrepreneurial execution.
Together, we built a better innovation model by combining Innventure's entrepreneurial agility with the resources and capabilities of a big company like P&G.
Talk about unleashing innovation beyond corporate walls...
This demonstrates what happens when we deliberately engineer better pathways between corporate innovation and market impact—creating a scalable, repeatable model for unlocking trapped value.
Today, PureCycle Technologies, is worth over a billion dollars. This was NOT luck.
This IS the definition of a deal-making machine.
Scalable.
Repeatable.
The Collaborative Innovation Model
The Innventure model works in four key phases:
1. EVALUATE: Assess the technology against market needs
2. FOUND: Create a new company around that technology
3. FUND: Provide the necessary capital to develop and scale the company
4. OPERATE: Leverage experienced entrepreneurs to drive commercial success
This creates value across the entire ecosystem:
- For corporations, it transforms R&D from a cost center into a value generator
- For inventors, it creates a path for their innovation to reach the market
- For investors, it provides access to early-stage opportunities with reduced risk
- For society, it is a solution addresses today's most pressing challenges
Breakthrough technologies deserve the opportunity to reach customers who need them today.
The market is hungry for these solutions.
This is one way to get there.
The Silicon Valley Contrast
Silicon Valley has long been the epicenter of innovation and disruption. But Silicon Valley isn't just a place. It's a mindset—a way of thinking about innovation that transcends geography.
That mindset is about seeing possibilities where others see barriers and connecting dots others haven't connected. This remarkable ecosystem has thrived on bold entrepreneurs creating new entities to pursue visionary ideas.
But what if we could expand the innovation ecosystem even further?
This is where our approach at Innventure differs from the traditional Silicon Valley model. While the startup ecosystem here has created extraordinary value, it also embraces a high failure rate as just part of the process.
We come from a different mindset that doesn't accept a "fail-fast" mentality. Large multinationals share this sentiment—it doesn't make sense for them to license valuable IP to an external partner only to see it fail.
This is exactly why Procter & Gamble, with its 187 years of measured, risk-averse decision-making, chose to work with us. Not because they were gamblers taking a chance, but because every other approach had failed to meet the market's need for high-quality recycled resin.
The results speak volumes: P&G and Innventure took that recycling technology from corporate lab to NASDAQ-listed company in just seven years. Today, PureCycle Technologies exceeds a billion-dollar valuation—not by chance, but through a deliberate model for commercializing disruptive technologies that's both scalable and repeatable.
This represents Silicon Valley thinking without Silicon Valley's acceptance of failure—a true market transformation that brings innovation to life beyond geographic boundaries.
The Power of Creative IP Deal-Making
As I look to the future of IP licensing and commercialization, I see tremendous opportunity to expand collaborative innovation models.
Across industries, organizations are recognizing that tomorrow's challenges require new forms of partnership.
From climate change to healthcare to artificial intelligence, the most pressing problems demand solutions that combine the resources and expertise of established organizations with the focus and agility of entrepreneurial operators.
One company. One idea. One invention cannot be the sole catalyst that transforms industries.
Silicon Valley has always led the way in redefining how innovation happens.
The spirit of Silicon Valley isn't just about creating new companies—it's about finding ways to bring transformative technologies to life, regardless of where they originate.
As IP experts and deal architects, you don't just facilitate transactions—you engineer the future. You stand at the intersection where groundbreaking discoveries transform into market-changing realities.
You understand better than most: markets evolve at their own pace, often faster than corporate strategic planning cycles. Breakthrough technologies deserve the opportunity to reach customers who need them today.
The Computer History Museum reminds us that the history of technology is NOT about a single moment or a lone inventor.
It's about a series of breakthroughs, each building on the last, which can be singular OR in parallel, and can potentially result in dual- or even multiple-use cases.
This changes everything. It changes how we think about IP licensing, how we approach technology commercialization, and how we define success.
The future belongs to those who can connect worlds—combining the resources and expertise of established organizations with the focus and agility of purpose-built entities.
By making these connections through creative IP frameworks, you can unleash innovation beyond corporate boundaries and transform industries.
The spirit of our work connects transformative technologies with markets that need them most, creating new value for corporations and society alike.
If you remember just one thing from our time together today, let it be THIS:
The question isn't whether we need breakthrough innovations—it's whether we'll create the pathways necessary for them to reach the world.
This article was originally posted as an original Innventure Thought Leadership Article.
For more information about how Innventure partners with multinational companies to commercialize disruptive technologies, visit www.innventure.com
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