Some of the greatest challenges to human and planetary health have already been answered in the lab. Betterlab builds ventures on that science — proven, patented, no product yet. With the scientists, inventors, and institutions who hold it, we decide what to build, design it, and own the venture that carries it to a strategic buyer.
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The science is proven. The inventions are protected. They are not meeting the world as intended, and they never will until someone decides what to build from them.
What keeps us up at night are the problems that remain after a viable solution has been developed, yet still fail — not for want of science, but because no one along the way is charged with deciding what it should become. Everyone in that chain is trained to evaluate. No one is there to decide.
What gets us up each morning is the knowledge that there are visionaries dedicating their lives to finding solutions intended to measurably change our world for the better.
We must support these ideas and the people behind them to have an impact that benefits us all. Innovative ideas need more than protection to see the light of day.
We must recognize that a portfolio of patents alone does little good. It is by converting the theory of innovators into things the world can use that meaningful progress is made.
We must learn to carry ideas across the distance between the laboratory and the world, where so many lose their way.
Solutions do not spread on merit alone. Only by delivering our life's work together is measurable change achieved.
Visionary solutions require visionary execution.
We start where the science is proven and the product isn't. Demonstrated in principle — a result, a paper, a working mechanism — with a patent issued or pending. That patent is what makes the science yours to build on, and ours to build with you.
Betterlab exists for solutions whose absence is felt at scale — in human health, or the condition of the planet we share.
What it has to become is a made thing. A device, a tool, an object, a system — science that takes physical form before it helps anyone. That's where design decides whether it ever arrives.
The device itself doesn't have to exist. Our first venture was a patent and nothing else when we started.
Some ventures are spun out of an institution, some are joint ventures with the inventor. Once the value is visible, the venture sells or licenses it to a manufacturer or a strategic buyer.
Science discovers what is possible. Design determines how it lives in the world.
We study what the science can do, where its advantage is defensible, and which human or planetary need gives that advantage its greatest consequence. Often the largest opportunity lies outside the field where the science was discovered, in a context where its value has not yet been seen. That is the work: finding the right question.
Make the science legible.
A patent must be exact. It is written to establish novelty, define claims, and protect an invention. That precision is essential, but it is not the language of adoption. We give the science a form equal to its intelligence and a shape the world can grasp.
Establish the position.
Legibility reveals where the invention belongs: the need it answers, the alternatives it surpasses, the people it serves, and the territory it can credibly own. Position is a strategic advantage made clear. It guides the product, the business, the story, and every decision that follows.
Design for adoption.
We shape the product and proposition so that manufacturers understand how to make it, partners understand why to carry it, investors understand where the value lies, and people understand why it matters to them. A company with reach is looking for a business whose hard questions already have answers. We answer them before the conversation begins — ready to enter a line, a salesforce, a shelf, with years of risk already taken off the table by the people who took it deliberately. What is understood can move. What is valued can scale. What is adopted can change the condition of humanity and the planet.
Build the venture.
We build it with the people who made the science possible. What each side brings is particular to the science and the moment. What does not vary is what the venture holds at the end: a product designed, a position established, a route to manufacture understood, and a reason to buy that a market recognizes. That body of work is intellectual property in its own right. It sits alongside the science, and by then neither half can be separated from the other.
The breakthroughs we care about do not come from science or design. They come from both, at once.
Todd Bracher is a designer, executive advisor, author, and educator with more than twenty-five years of practice. A Fulbright Fellow, trained at Pratt and in Copenhagen, he worked across Milan, Paris, and London — creative director at Georg Jensen, head of Tom Dixon's brand — before establishing his own studio in Brooklyn. He has been named International Designer of the Year three times, has brought more than 200 products to market, and holds two dozen patents, with work for Herman Miller, 3M, Georg Jensen, and Issey Miyake, and pieces held in museum collections. His work has been recognized with Fast Company's World Changing Ideas and Innovation by Design awards. He advises companies on design and strategy, lectures internationally, and set out his method — context-based design — in his 2025 book Design in Context. He is the subject of a Phaidon monograph, Observations, Research, and Design.
www.toddbracher.com
We work with scientists, inventors, and the institutions that hold their patents.If you hold a patent on science that could improve human or planetary health, and what stands between it and the world is a product rather than another study — a device, a tool, an object, a system, something that has to be made before it can help anyone — we should talk.
Whether that product exists yet makes no difference. The less that has been decided, the more there is for us to find.
By appointment
Building 275 Suite 403
63 Flushing Avenue
Brooklyn NY 11205
hello@betterlab.com