Daniel Behr

Background

About Daniel Behr

I'm an innovation catalyst and entrepreneurial leader skilled at commercializing inventions and ideas to address customers’ unmet needs and to generate enterprise growth. I bring a unique combination of experiences in business & innovation strategy, startups, venture capital, business development, and university technology transfer. Using innovation as a lever for growth and value creation is a common thread in my career. In some cases this involves finding or building pathways to enable the translation of new technologies and ideas into viable products and solutions; in other cases it involves the discovery of customers' unmet needs that can be addressed with innovations such as new products and services or even simply with more finely-tuned messaging. My innovation expertise is industry and product agnostic - for example, most recently I've applied it in early-stage biotech, performance fabrics, and specialty plastic films. In prior years I helped bring products to markets in materials science and industrial instrumentation. Some recent examples- As CEO of SLIPS Technologies (now Adaptive Surface Technologies), a venture-funded Harvard spinout: leading the business and product development efforts to translate a 'super-slippery' surface technology into sellable products such as a marine anti-fouling coating for boat hulls- As innovation strategy consultant to a leading privately-held textiles manufacturer: developing and executing a new organizational design to focus the enterprise on discovering customers’ unmet needs and then addressing them through innovation- As executive director of Brown University’s technology transfer office: negotiating research collaborations with industry partners to accelerate the commercialization of university inventions. Specialties: innovation strategy, growth strategy, customer unmet needs discovery, technology commercialization, intellectual property (IP) strategy, go-to-market planning and execution, startups, entrepreneurship, university tech transfer, venture capital.