Most large companies are sitting on patents they will never use. Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross, the founder of Pasadena-based incubator Idealab, thinks AI can turn them into new businesses.
His latest venture, Idealab.ai, is an AI business-idea engine that has so far generated more than 1.2 million business ideas. Students, entrepreneurs, and universities are free to search and use these public ideas. For a fee, Gross is also offering the platform to corporates so they can mine their own intellectual property for new businesses.
The corporate opportunity lies in finding potential business solutions in a company’s existing research and intellectual property. A technology developed for one application may solve a different problem in another market, says Gross. Idealab.ai applies his own idea-generation methods to connect those capabilities with unmet needs and with market shifts that make an opportunity timely.
Idealab.ai is meant to support corporate innovation teams, not replace them. “The output gives the team a potential business to investigate,” says Gross. “People still make the investment decisions and do the work of building the business.”
One public example of how a corporate might benefit from the platform uses Idealab’s own patent application for a highly insulated tile. The engine proposed insulated replacement roof tiles, a thin insulating facade system for building retrofits, and licensing deals with tile manufacturers.
Idealab.ai has begun discussions with large corporations about a pilot. The plan is for the corporate offering to run in a secure, private environment scoped to each organization, which could include an on-premises deployment. Only the client’s team will be able to access the results; Idealab.ai will not see them or use them to train its models, says Gross. The organization owns the ideas generated in its private instance and can develop, license, or spin them out. Clients will be able to choose which AI model to use. Annual corporate pricing will depend on the engagement’s scope and usage. A dedicated server will carry a one-time setup fee.
Creating A Million New Businesses And 100 Million New Jobs
Gross, who has created more than 175 companies through Idealab and Idealab Studios, has built his own secret sauce into the business-idea engine. Over a career focused on problem solving, Gross has refined 31 methods of generating business ideas. They range from starting with a customer’s pain and making something radically better to harnessing new technical capabilities and getting the timing right.
In an initial test, Gross fed Anthropic’s Claude AI model 7,000 articles that identified problems, then asked it to apply his 31 methods to those pain points and suggest novel ways to apply new technologies. “It came up with 32,000 business ideas just from the 7,000 articles, and they were really, really good,” says Gross. “They blew me away.”
So Gross bought $100,000 worth of articles and fed them into Claude, along with problems mentioned in the public patent database, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, product recall data, scientific papers, and complaints on sites such as Reddit and X (formerly Twitter). The model generated 1.2 million ideas. “Developing our atlas of ideas was expensive and will continue to be so,” says Gross. Even so, he decided to put the ideas into a searchable database and give them away to budding entrepreneurs and academia. The official launch was October 19.
As an example of the kinds of ideas the engine generates, Gross cites its response to consumer concern about gas prices. It suggested creating an app that would charge consumers $5 a month to join a group that would mimic the way airlines hedge against fuel price increases. “That is something I would not have thought about,” says Gross.
Using AI to generate a massive number of solid business ideas that solve real-world problems became possible in the past few months, thanks to advances in frontier models, says Gross. “We are taking advantage of the technology right at the moment of the shift,” he says.
The goal is to help create a million new businesses and 100 million new jobs by giving people free tools to find ideas and build them into businesses, says Gross. Corporate engagements will help Idealab.ai underwrite access for individuals and academic institutions.
“This is our long-term ambition,” says Gross. “Our immediate focus is on helping people discover and test ideas, then expanding the tools that help them build. Reaching that scale will depend on the entrepreneurs themselves and the universities, investors, and other organizations supporting them.”
Gross says Idealab.ai could be the biggest thing he ever does. “I have tried to scale myself through Idealab,” he says. “This is way better.”
It Feels Like A Revolution
Gross acknowledges that it takes more than ideas to build a good company. Execution is key. During their two to five years at Idealab, incubated companies are offered help with back-office functions such as payroll, health care, and marketing. “Obviously, we can’t provide that for people globally, so instead [Idealab.ai] is building a periodic table of business functions using agentic tools that entrepreneurs can talk to in natural language and use as a kind of operating system for their business,” says Gross.
The periodic table organizes the work of starting and running a company into 118 business functions, including customer discovery, product development, finance, and sales. The experience is intended to be conversational: A founder describes what needs to happen, and the platform brings together the relevant tools or services, explains Gross. People set the goals, make judgments, and approve actions.
For example, a demand-validation workflow might begin with a founder asking, “Help me test who would pay for this idea.” An agent could then help draft an interview guide, organize feedback from prospective customers, and summarize the assumptions to test next. The founder would decide whom to approach and whether the evidence supports moving forward. The functions are still being developed and will be introduced in stages, with offerings expanding during 2027, says Gross. Using the table to organize a business is free; connected services will likely carry a fee.
Eventually, Gross hopes to use the platform to connect users with potential funders and partners. “We can be like Y Combinator [a prominent Silicon Valley startup accelerator], only you don’t have to move; you can stay in your own region and build your business,” he says.
Gross believes the platform can make an impact on corporates as well. An April 2026 EY-Parthenon survey of large U.S. companies found that 63% are using AI mainly to boost efficiency and productivity; only 7% are using it primarily to diversify revenue streams. Gross thinks Idealab.ai is well positioned to be the catalyst that changes that. “It feels like the beginning of a revolution,” he says.
It is unclear how many corporates will capitalize on Idealab.ai. Turning a patent gathering dust into a new business requires more than a good idea. “Ideas are abundant; the real differentiator is entrepreneurial leadership — the willingness to rethink end-to-end processes, reshape operating models, and turn new technological possibilities into new business models,” says Dr. Carsten Linz, CEO of bluegain, a technology and professional services firm specializing in large-scale transformation. That is a problem no idea engine can solve on its own.
-ends-
