The Public Company Unlocking Corporate Innovation

Multinational companies spend trillions of dollars on R&D annually. But what becomes of the promising technologies that never see the light of day?

Research and development are the backbone of our world's progress, responsible for everything from algorithms that predict maintenance failures to revolutionary materials reshaping industrial possibilities. Many of these innovations are created in corporate hubs, which operate as the quiet engines of technological advancement.

Yet despite multinational corporations investing large sums of money into R&D each year, the majority of their technologies remain uncommercialized, says Roland Austrup, Chief Growth Officer of Innventure (NASDAQ: INV).

In the high-stakes world of corporate innovation, these unrealized opportunities represent both a challenge and an untapped reservoir of value waiting for the right commercialization pathway. And this overlooked opportunity is what Innventure has built its entire business model around.

“We're not a venture capital firm or an incubator—we're founders and operators who build businesses that we believe have the potential to reach billion-dollar valuations,” says Austrup.

Innventure was founded by scientists and entrepreneurs who identify promising innovations in research labs, provide funding and entrepreneurial expertise, and then transform those opportunities into standalone companies as a solution to the innovation gap between corporate R&D and the marketplace.

Innventure aims to create high-growth businesses to help solve tomorrow’s biggest challenges—and so far, it’s making a meaningful impact.

The science of a systematic approach to company creation

Multinational corporations with substantial R&D investments are among the world's biggest investors in research and development, but the technologies they develop aren't always within their core focus.

All too often, promising technologies remain unrealized—not because they lack potential, but because of the realities of resource allocation or core competencies. For instance, a consumer goods company might develop a groundbreaking packaging material, or a telecommunications giant might create an innovative hardware solution.

Unlike traditional venture capital or private equity firms, which primarily provide funding and limited oversight, Innventure assembles complete company-building teams—from executives and technical experts to marketing and operations professionals—to found, fund, operate and scale selected opportunities. This operational intensity, combined with their systematic evaluation, creates what Austrup calls “the science of company creation”—a repeatable methodology for transforming corporate innovations into market-leading businesses.

Through a distinctive conglomerate structure, Innventure creates a unique economic engine where each new company contributes to potential long-term value creation. This model offers public market investors something rarely available elsewhere: exposure to multiple early-stage technology opportunities with the potentially reduced risk profile that comes from corporate validation and systematic evaluation.

As these individual companies address growing markets like data center cooling or sustainable packaging, the model aims to generate compounding returns from innovations that might otherwise remain unrealized. The strategy combines the potential upside of early-stage technology with the disciplined approach and reduced risk typically associated with more mature opportunities.

Equally important, Innventure collaborates with multinational corporations to understand and quantify the size of markets and potential demand with the goal of mitigating the risk of market rejection through a rigorous analysis of each opportunity through four critical dimensions: market need, technological advantage, commercial pathway and execution strategy.

The company combines corporate technical validation with entrepreneurial execution capabilities to accelerate market adoption.

Finally, to close the loop, Innventure builds companies around these technology solutions by collaborating with multinational corporations that can become first customers or help catalyze early market adoption.

“When we look to commercialize a technology, a key factor is having a multinational partner that can help us get to the market,” Austrup says. “It’s a rifle approach as we seek to create businesses with a high probability of success.”

A model that’s already producing real-world companies

Innventure’s approach is working: Since 2015, the company has launched four successful businesses from the ground up, including PureCycle Technologies (NASDAQ: PCT), which recycles polypropylene plastic based on technology sourced from Procter & Gamble; AeroFlexx, which produces a sustainable, flexible liquid packaging solution also created with P&G technology; Accelsius, which offers two-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology; and Refinity, which seeks to commercialize advanced recycling technologies for conversion of plastic waste to drop-in chemicals in collaboration with The Dow Chemical Company.

In 2022, Innventure created Accelsius, a company tackling one of the biggest challenges of the digital era: cooling data centers. As demand for AI has exploded, so has the demand for energy to power computer chips and data centers—testing the limits of thermal management systems, stressing power grids and increasing costs.

Accelsius’s two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology uses up to 50% less energy than traditional data center air-cooling and provides uniform cooling for high-heat flux computer chips—a critical solution for the challenge that threatens to bottleneck the AI revolution: heat.

Austrup likens Accelsius to an essential tool in a time of rapid technological growth.

“It’s one of the only suppliers of useful shovels to gold miners in the gold boom,” he says.

Opening opportunities to everyday investors

Innventure was listed on NASDAQ in October 2024, and its shareholders have exposure to early-stage innovations through the company. But it’s not just about the timing, Austrup says.

“It’s about launching companies with data, proven technology and a built-in go-to-market strategy,” he says. “I like to say we look for early-stage economics with later-stage risk.”

In other words, it’s a chance for investors to participate in the next big thing—before it’s the next big thing.
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(Created in collaboration with Bloomberg Media Studios)

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