Network Profile – Dave Roberts

Dave Roberts

Founder / Specialist in IP Strategy and Process Innovation

Dave is a Chemical Engineer by training. He has led global innovation teams for Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo across foods, detergents, home care, beauty care and new ventures, initially focusing on process development in existing markets such as factory quality initiatives but gradually evolving his role upstream, towards a practical specialism in front end of innovation and strategic specialism in IP.

A constant theme throughout this has been Dave’s focus on people growth and capability. This motivation eventually drove Dave to spend part of his career in a secondary school teaching science, and then at the University of Oxford with Isis Innovation, developing IP and commercialising University inventions from the Physical Sciences.

Dave has also worked with yet2.com, a global Open Innovation firm, where he worked as a technology scout and intermediary between large and small companies and academia, connecting the need with the solution. This was a pivotal time in Dave’s career, embedding the desire to adopt a more diverse approach to help companies leverage innovation, in an even more holistic way: using a broader range of skills, bringing together strategy with deeper, more disruptive ideas, planning with creativity, and merging OI and IP with all of the above.

In 2011, Dave founded NLI. The vision is to use the broadest thinking to help companies turn blank sheets of paper into smart, creative, product and technology ideas and plans before any serious resource gets allocated, and then using science, and collaborative problem solving to make the best ideas come true. All the while facilitating learning & growth and building capability.