Lawrence Lee

Lawrence Lee is Senior Director of Strategic Development at SRI, where he leads the cross-functional strategy team in SRI’s Commercialization Group called the SRI Refinery, which validates and refines technologies from research into a sustained pipeline of commercial R&D, licensing, and venture transactions. He is a technology commercialization, strategy, and new venture creation executive with more than 20 years of experience in startups and at two of the world’s most storied R&D organizations, Xerox PARC and SRI. 

At SRI, Lawrence also leads a team that delivers commercialization services to government R&D funding agencies including DARPA Commercial Accelerator, which drives commercialization of critical technologies for national security and economic impact, and the NIST Quantum Manufacturing Engineering Center, which addresses scalability challenges in enabling technologies for the quantum industry. He also partners with SLAC and Sandia on the DOE COMPASS program to launch startups from U.S. national labs and works with an SRI team and other partners on a pilot program with Japan’s Cabinet Office to build Deep Tech ventures at the Global Startup Campus in Tokyo.  

Before joining SRI, Lawrence spent more than a decade at Xerox and PARC. As Vice President and Head of Strategy & Planning, New Ventures, he led strategy and planning for Xerox’s Global R&D organization, managed the PARC innovation portfolio across growth markets including additive manufacturing, IoT, AI, and cleantech, and co-led the design and launch of a Deep Tech venture studio that spun out four ventures in its first cohort. Earlier at PARC, as Senior Director of Strategy, he built the analytical tools and processes behind PARC’s open innovation business model and developed its portfolio management methodology. 

Earlier in his career, Lawrence co-founded Zoundry, an early social commerce startup, and served as Vice President of Business Development at Mirror Worlds Technologies, a spinout from Yale’s Computer Science department. He holds an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Yale School of Management and a BSE/BAS from the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology at Wharton and the School of Engineering and Applied Science.