Intellectual Property: Creating Competitive Advantage

Dr. Stephen Di Biase is co-Founder and Managing Director for VentureForge, LLC. He is also the Founder and Owner of Premier Insights, LLC, an innovation practices consultancy, and co-Founder and Managing Director of VentureForge, LLC, an early stage accelerator working with startups to define their value proposition and describe it in quantitative financial terms and investors to locate well understood and assessed investments. He is a member of Cornerstone Angels, a Chicago-based angel investor group, served as the Chief Executive Officer of Laser Application Technologies, a high technology company delivering technology to the food service industry, is a Vistage Chair currently mentors CEOs of technology based startups, and is a past adjunct professor at Benedictine University.

Previously, Dr. Di Biase served as the Chief Scientific Officer of Elevance Renewable Sciences a high technology specialty chemicals company and as the Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for the Research Development and Engineering Department at Diversey Inc. In these roles, he was responsible for technology innovation, research, development efforts, and technical resource management. Dr. Di Biase also served as interim Senior Vice President of Human Resources.

Before joining JohnsonDiversey, Dr. Di Biase spent 26 years with the Lubrizol Corporation, where he held a variety of leadership positions, including general management roles and Vice President – Research, Development and Engineering and Vice President – Emulsified Products. He is a 1974 graduate of St. John Fisher College with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and earning a doctorate degree in chemistry from Pennsylvania State University in 1978.

Dr. Di Biase is also a past member of the Board of Trustees for the Mt. Union College and the Industrial Research Institute and sits on the Science Advisory Board for The Pennsylvania State University. He has served as chairman of The Lubrizol Foundation Scholarship Committee, Chairman of the Northeastern Ohio Section of the American Chemical Society, Board member of the Cleveland Area Research Directors (CARD) and in The Boy Scouts of America where he served in a variety of posts. Dr. Di Biase has been honored by The Pennsylvania State University College of Science with its 2007 Distinguished Alumni Award. He is also guest lecturer on entrepreneurship and innovation at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University.