At FEI25, All Things Innovation had the chance to sit down with Colin Scott, Senior Vice President, DownSelect at Innventure, to discuss the company’s own unique formula when it comes to research, development and bringing new ideas to market.
At the conference, Scott held the session, “Harvesting Innovation Through Collective Intelligence.” This session examined a systematic approach to evaluating and commercializing breakthrough technologies that have the potential to transform high-potential corporate R&D into market-ready companies. Innventure’s DownSelect analysis harnesses data-driven analysis to identify, evaluate, and access breakthrough technologies with $1B+ enterprise value potential across industries through multinational corporation R&D, channel partners, and innovation networks.
A Systematic Approach to Innovation
In an era where corporations invest billions annually in R&D, how do you identify which innovations are truly ready for harvest? Can you talk a little bit about Innventure’s systematic approach to technology evaluation?
“For us as a company, collective intelligence is really about being intentional and systematic about gathering a wide variety of perspectives as you’re trying to understand how to not only invent technology, but harvest the innovation as commercialization,” relates Scott. “It helps you really understand more about what the right decisions are, but also helps align everyone in your organization to be able to accomplish that harvesting of the innovation, and really aligning to that business growth strategy.”
Can you share more about Innventure and its innovation ecosystem process?
Scott says, “There’s no one organization that really has everything that’s required to fully capture all of the unrealized value that they have within their organization. It requires building an innovation ecosystem to fill any gaps. That’s what we think. We’re doing that at Innventure because many times companies build very novel technology solutions to meaningful strategic needs that they have that are felt widely in the industry, but for many very smart reasons they decided they’re not the right ones to commercialize that going forward.”
He continues, “For something that truly is game changing but might not be at the strategic core of a company, they would collaborate with us because what we do is we build companies to transform tomorrow. And what that means is we found, fund, operate, scale these companies built off of those transformative technology solutions to those significant unmet needs, but we do it in a way that collaborates with multinationals because they can really help us work together.”
It’s an interesting mix at Innventure—it seems to have both a startup mentality yet the experience of a corporation.
“We have the agility of startups and they have the stability and scale of multinationals so that together we’re able to really reduce risk and accelerate success for every company that we start, especially because they have an understanding of the market, the need, the customer, how that technology solution drives economic value, and ultimately they drive early adoption by being a first customer or channel to first customers,” says Scott.
Winning the Innovation Process
This kind of partnership seems to have a lot of benefits to it, including an accelerated innovation process. There’s a lot of challenges, but also opportunities with startups and venture capital. What do you bring to the table, say with the DownSelect process, that helps encourage this startup mentality?
“We think that we really bring a lot of pieces from many different parts of this ecosystem,” says Scott. “Maybe a little bit startup mentality, a little bit VC approach to funding and supporting, a little bit private equity for support and operation, but ultimately we are all of those things together. We focus in on DownSelect on trying to understand the opportunities that are really a best fit for our model to commercialize and scale. There are a lot of different paths to unlock unrealized value in in the company’s R&D portfolio. Only a small number of those things fit with our approach.”
He adds, “We don’t play the portfolio risk game because we don’t have fungible cash that we’re just distributing between different ideas. We’re investing ourselves because we’re the operator, we’re the builder. And our partners are investing a seed of a technology. Those things aren’t fungible. So we make sure that with DownSelect we understand what the things about that particular opportunity are that are most important, that are most critical for its success. And we define our strategy in a way that helps enable that. We understand what the critical risks are and we define our strategy so that we can manage that. And that’s what our system really does. It helps us figure out which games to play and how to play those games to win.”
Bringing Solutions to Customers
In terms of people or processes that drive innovation, your company seems to have really keyed in on partnerships and collaboration. What do you look for in terms of the innovation when you’re partnering with these companies or startups?
“We don’t focus on any particular industry or any particular type of technology,” says Scott. “What we really focus on are opportunities that have the potential to really be game changing. When you introduce a new technology solution to the market to an otherwise unmet need, you by definition change the market. It’s extremely important for us to be able to understand how the introduction of that solution is likely to change the market in a way that can drive new economic value. We focus on business-to-business companies specifically for that reason. Because as we understand how a technology solution brings economic value to the customer, we understand the strategy that’s required to execute on that. For us, what we focus on are the ways, the opportunities, that have the highest potential to create new economic value for customers in the market.”
