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Open Call
Global industries that anchor the economy are now facing a decisive moment in their journey toward ambitious 2030 sustainability targets. The time is ticking for corporations—think Apple, Target, CVS—to continue their growth while delivering on their sustainability promises. And with the shifting political landscape in the United States, the need for those corporations to ramp up their decarbonization efforts is even more pressing.
At Newlab, we fundamentally believe that established and industry-leading corporations hold the key to accelerating the world towards our necessary innovation goals. They have the financial clout, entrenched supply chains, and market access necessary to make these goals a reality.
That’s not to say it’s only a matter of will—in my time at Newlab, I’ve seen three common challenges that frequently disrupt a company’s ability to successfully innovate and adopt new technologies:
As a result, founders are left to chart their own path in redefining these sectors that have been established by incumbent industry players. To overcome these barriers, a fresh approach to corporate innovation and investment is necessary. At Newlab, we work closely with startups and corporations to pilot and scale critical technology—i.e., technology that the world needs to transform core industries and decarbonize. From my experience, companies that empower the spirit of innovation with the right resources, authority, and a clear mandate tend to drive business growth in new ways while accelerating their progress toward sustainability goals. Here’s how:
As corporations adapt to changing market, political, and climate landscapes, integrating innovation with financial strategy is a precursor to building a functional innovation program. For those founders and investors building critical solutions, this shift can open doors like never before... but we need more.
Leading companies are beginning to make real moves that rethink their venture and asset management approaches, prioritizing deep tech driven solutions that can bring value to their core operations. This type of alignment is a necessary, but only early, tailwind at Newlab as we work to embed our founders’ technologies into larger platforms and ecosystems, ensuring maximum impact and scalability.
It's clear that CFOs are becoming major allies in this push. Significant climate funds launched by Microsoft and Mitsubishi to scale carbon-reduction solutions are precisely the kinds of funding that help climate tech startups move from early stage to scale. CFOs are also starting to push new, sustainable finance vehicles as a way to diversify their capital sources. Unilever’s issuance of green bonds to finance their water and waste initiatives shows how companies are drawing in ESG-focused investors, which also signals to innovators that there’s capital and corporate interest for their impactful solutions. One organization we partnered with leveraged a similar bond vehicle to fund electric vehicles and charging infrastructure for their multinational fleet—a strategic move that aligned both their climate and financial objectives around startups and pilot projects that came out of our program.
CFOs should pay attention to regional public policy initiatives that bring market incentives and leveraged capital to promote regional reindustrialization projects aligned with their growth objectives. Newlab worked with the State of Michigan to establish a regulatory sandbox and allocate funding to support advanced aerial mobility projects. We’ve now engaged several industry partners interested in seeding and incubating solutions in Michigan that they can soon adopt into their own logistics operations.
By integrating financial tools with innovation initiatives, corporations can better meet stakeholder expectations for both growth and climate impact.
A common block for corporations pursuing sustainability goals is integrating innovation throughout their value chains. Cross-chain partnerships are necessary to co-develop and co-invest in technologies, sharing the risk of change across the manufacturing and logistics that connect suppliers with the end buyers and users.
Companies that rethink their value chains are seeing significant results. Walmart met its emissions reduction target six years ahead of schedule by collaborating with partners and suppliers to optimize energy use, packaging, and waste management. This can also mean collaboration within a vertical to spur demand. Google, Microsoft, and Nucor recently joined forces to pool their demand for clean energy technologies, creating a natural market of next-generation renewable and energy storage solutions.
In many organizations, innovation teams often operate as siloed units, collecting data on emerging technologies and market trends, but rarely given the authority to act. By contrast, forward-thinking companies are restructuring these teams to drive partnerships, foster R&D, and make strategic investments in early-stage technologies.
We are starting to see examples of re-alignment between finance, innovation, and sustainability at the organizational level in a positive way. We’ve seen innovation teams roll up to the CFO, which creates a natural link between innovation initiatives and financial outcomes. Aligning innovation KPIs with broader business metrics ensures that efforts remain focused and measurable.
Through our work at Newlab, we’ve facilitated over 100 pilot programs with startups, with nearly a third of those pilots resulting in commercial advancement with industry partners. Our model integrates well with corporate partners that have a well-crafted innovation and investment strategy. For example, when Verizon piloted a bi-directional EV charging system at Newlab, they brought together engineers, supply chain partners, and a venture capital arm to ensure the success of the pilot was scaled.
At Newlab, we see immense potential for corporations to push beyond incremental progress and fully unlock their innovation ambitions. Partnering with startups is how enterprises can move from vision to action—leveraging the deep technologies that can transform value chains and drive decarbonization at scale. Yet too often, promising initiatives stall due to constraints around resource allocation, organizational misalignment, and rigidity across partners in a sector.
That’s where we come in. As a global venture platform, we collaborate closely with corporate innovation teams, regional governments, and startups, turning ambition into commercial opportunities and measurable results. By aligning these efforts with broader financial and operational goals, we help companies drive business growth at the intersection of industrialization and sustainability, shaping a future that’s built to last.
Interested in learning more about the impact of our work? Download our 2024 Impact Report.
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