In this episode, Ola Vasvik discusses the future of intellectual property, the impact of AI on patenting, and how deep tech companies can navigate the complex world of innovation and protection. Discover how Lightbringer is revolutionizing IP management and why every company should have a clear IP strategy.

Michael Carter is the founding principal of Carter Morse & Goodrich. He has been on the financial side of business from many perspectives: as a business founder, commercial lender, investment banker, board director, and business advisor. As a seasoned investment banker, he has advised over 100 M&A and financing transactions.

But that's not the real story....

Because there are a handful of stages in the world that carry a kind of gravity. You know the one I mean. Three letters that have come to stand for the best ideas humanity has to offer, delivered in a way that stays with you long after the lights come up. Very few people ever get to stand on a stage like that. Fewer still get to build one.

He is one of the few. This month, on 30 September, he is hosting TEDxInnovation Drive, which brings that same spirit to Connecticut for the first time. And he has done far more than book a venue and print a programme. He has authored a vision for what innovation really is and who it belongs to, assembled a team from scratch, curated a room, won the backing of world-class sponsors for something that did not yet exist, and brought in a coach to help a lineup of accomplished, world-renowned speakers give the talk of their lives.

Lukas Waeschle is co-founder and CEO of Node 42, an AI-native startup that comes out of stealth on this episode. His path here was anything but linear. He dropped out of mechanical engineering, switched to political science, then spent years in industry across sales, sales management and product management, carrying what he describes as a long-running inferiority complex about lacking a business or engineering degree. That shifted when a corporate venture project inside a large medtech company pulled him into business innovation, where he finally found his footing.

Three realisations shape what he's building now. Every company chasing adjacent growth runs into the same structural walls. Everyone reinvents the wheel, even though decades of evidence-based frameworks are readily available. And those frameworks are nearly impossible to apply in practice, let alone scale. Node 42 builds them into software, jobs-to-be-done above all, using knowledge graphs to give mid-sized companies a digital twin of their market.

He set up in Ravensburg, near Lake Constance, on purpose: close to the German Mittelstand hidden champions he's serving, far from the noise. At 42, with a family and a quarter of a million in pre-seed raised, he's an unapologetic Clayton Christensen believer and proof that experience can be an asset rather than a delay.