NTT Scale Academy unlocks the IP prison

Corporate research labs are notorious for their graveyards of innovation. Brilliant patents sit gathering dust, too academic to sell, too risky to shelve. For NTT, which invests $3 billion annually in R&D, it’s become research for the sake of it. Now it’s time for a change.

Bennett Indart, Senior Vice President of Product Incubation at NTT Research, is here to break the locks. His new mandate is simple: find the diamond in the rough and force it into the market. “The DNA our team brings is how one plus one equals five.”

Indart is not building another internal R&D group. He is running a venture capital engine inside a Japanese giant called Scale Academy. His first target is Salt Grain, a commercial spin-out powered by a 20-year-old cryptographic breakthrough called Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE).

The challenge for Indart is how to balance the cultural clash between Japanese corporate caution and Silicon Valley’s “fail fast” speed. He talks about the need to navigate the boardroom to secure funding without relying on quarterly profit pressures. In the podcast, we ask the hard question: can a legacy giant actually move fast enough to beat the startups already building on this tech?

If you have ever wondered what happens when a research budget meets a commercial mandate, this is the conversation you need to hear.

To hear how Bennett Indart plans to turn research into a billion-dollar business, listen to the podcast.

Where can I get it?

You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the player below. Alternatively, click on any of the podcast services below and go to the Enterprise Times podcast page.

 

 

 

The post NTT Scale Academy unlocks the IP prison appeared first on Enterprise Times.