Betterlab partners with scientists and inventors whose proven science can answer the greatest challenges to human and planetary health, and hasn't reached the world.
We design what the discovery should become, and build the venture that carries it there.
Bringing Science to Life.
Many of the world's leading challenges to human and planetary health have already been solved. The science is proven and the inventions are protected. They are not meeting the world as intended, and they never will until someone guides them there.
What keeps us up at night are the problems that remain after a viable solution has been developed yet still fail for reasons that are solvable.
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 expert stewardship at every step 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 tangible plans that meaningful progress is made.
We must learn to navigate the technological, business, and communication hurdles that cause many life-changing ideas to lose their way.
Solutions do not spread on merit alone. Only by delivering our life's work together can the intent of measurable change be achieved.
Visionary solutions require visionary execution.
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. We look beyond the application already imagined. Often the largest opportunity for a technology lies outside the field in which it was discovered, in a context where its value has not yet been seen. That is the work: not decorating an answer, but finding the right question. From there we design the expression of the science and the strategy around it as one undertaking. The product makes the capability tangible. The positioning makes its difference unmistakable. The venture gives it a path to scale. Each decision sharpens the others.
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. Betterlab gives technical possibility a shape the world can see and grasp. Not by simplifying the science, but by giving it a form equal to its intelligence.
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 not a slogan. It 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 can understand how to make it, partners can understand why to carry it, investors can understand where the value lies, and people can understand why it matters to them. What is understood can move. What is valued can scale. What is adopted can change the condition of humanity and the planet.
Build the vehicle.
Around the opportunity, we build a venture with the people who made the science possible. What each side brings, and what the venture becomes, 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 is what design contributes, it sits alongside the science, and by then neither half can be separated from the other.
Hand over something finished.
A company with reach is not looking for a patent and a hope. It is looking for a business whose hard questions already have answers. We answer them before the conversation begins. What we hand over is ready to enter a line, a salesforce, a shelf — years of risk already taken off the table by the people who took it deliberately. That is what a patent alone can never be, and it is what the venture is sold or licensed on.
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