Jacob Dutton

I build new ventures, products and services inside large companies, as well as the systems that make innovation a systematic, scalable and repeatable pursuit. I've done it for 18 years with Fortune 500s, sovereign and venture funds, and founders, across industries financial services, energy, transport, industrials, hospitality and health.

Then I started building the machinery to make this work intentionally; I launched Interpublic's first innovation studio across product, engineering, design, data science and commercial, launching new propositions for companies like JCB, Avon and Holland & Barrett. I co-founded Future Foundry, a business experimentation practice working with Salesforce, Microsoft, Mars, Hilton, Ørsted, P&G, USPS, Walgreens and Kingfisher. And Curzon Street Ventures, the UK's first place-based venture studio, where we validated and spun out six ventures with corporate partners including Kaiser Permanente, BP, Airbus, GXO, Grant Thornton and SC, and recruited the founders to relocate and build them.

Most recently I ran innovation, R&D and emerging technology enablement across ADQ's $300bn+ portfolio of twenty-plus operating companies in Abu Dhabi, including Etihad, TAQA, AD Ports and PureHealth along with an AED 500M fund, with every investment gated on validated evidence.

What I'm good at is narrow and increasingly important in the age of abundant ideas; finding where new value is available, designing the proposition that captures it, proving it cheaply before anyone commits capital, and taking it to market.

Now I'm at Aucctus, building an AI-native operating system for enterprise innovation, alongside Fortune 500 customers. AI has made the front end of this work close to free, which moves the constraint to judgement, and to who decides where the capital goes.