We are honored to feature Laura D’Angelo, Venture Strategy & Development Director at Eniverse Ventures (Eni). Laura brings a powerful combination of engineering expertise and strategic leadership, with a career spanning construction engineering, corporate finance, M&A, compliance, and open innovation ecosystems within Eni.

At the Global Women in Pipeline during PTC Berlin, Laura delivered an inspiring keynote sharing valuable insights on industry transformation, innovation, and the importance of empowering women in traditionally male-dominated sectors. Her perspective bridged technical depth with strategic foresight, highlighting both challenges and actionable best practices for driving inclusion and sustainable growth in the energy and pipeline sector.

We also extend our sincere appreciation to Enivibes, not only for supporting this initiative as a sponsor, but for actively contributing to a more diverse, innovative, and sustainable future in our industry. Sponsorship in this context goes beyond visibility, it represents a commitment to shaping the next generation of leadership and technological progress.
 

1. Looking ahead to the next decade, how do you envision venture building and open innovation reshaping the energy and pipeline industry, particularly in terms of sustainability and digital transformation?

Over the next decade, I believe venture building and open innovation will play an increasingly important role as enablers of transformation in the energy sector.

We are entering a phase where change is no longer linear or predictable. Companies are required to manage multiple transitions simultaneously — from decarbonization to digitalization — while dealing with growing system complexity. In this context, traditional innovation models can struggle to deliver impact at the required speed and scale.

What venture building offers is a way to bridge the gap between technology development and market application. It allows organizations to test solutions in real environments, connect internal capabilities with external ecosystems, and accelerate their path to industrialization.

As I often say, venture building is not about creating startups — it’s about making innovation happen faster, closer to the market, and with real industrial impact.

Ultimately, it contributes to making innovation more concrete, market-oriented, and execution-driven — complementing more traditional research approaches and helping organizations move more effectively from idea to impact.
 

2. You have worked across engineering, finance, M&A, and compliance. How have these experiences shaped your approach to innovation?

My experience across different domains has taught me a fundamental principle: innovation only matters if it can be executed — everything else remains potential.

A strong idea or a breakthrough technology is not enough. It needs to translate into something that works in a real industrial environment — technically, economically, and operationally. At the same time, this path helped me develop what I often describe as a dual perspective — or an ambidextrous approach — the ability to stay fully grounded in today’s constraints and execution, while maintaining a clear view on future scenarios and opportunities.

This perspective is deeply connected to how we approach innovation at Eni. We operate through a dual innovation model, where long-term research and near-term industrial applications evolve in parallel. In this context, Eniverse plays a crucial role, acting as an accelerator that helps bring innovation closer to the market — identifying the right industrial partnerships, de-risking initiatives from a financial perspective, and shaping effective go-to-market strategies.

This is what allows us to connect vision and execution in a very concrete way.

More broadly, I’ve learned that innovation is not only about technology. It’s about people, alignment, and the ability to navigate complexity together.
 

3. At the Global Women in Pipeline, you spoke about challenges and opportunities for women in the industry. From your perspective, what are the most effective actions organizations can take to accelerate female leadership in technical fields?

From my perspective, the most effective actions are often the most concrete and intentional.

First of all, mentorship and sponsorship are both essential — and complementary. As I often summarise it: mentorship gives direction. Sponsorship creates opportunity.

We need both: mentorship helps build awareness, confidence and clarity, and sponsorship is what actively creates access — to opportunities, visibility, and critical experiences.

Another key element is visibility and trust. Careers are not built only on performance, but also on exposure, trust and access.

Perhaps the most important shift, however, is cultural. We need to move from considering empowerment as a “women’s topic” to recognizing it as a wider leadership responsibility. And this also means actively involving male leaders — not as external supporters, but as real agents of change.
 

4. Eniverse Ventures is built around collaboration and ecosystem thinking. How important are cross-industry partnerships in solving today’s energy challenges?

They are absolutely essential. The challenges we face today are too complex to be addressed within a single organization or discipline. They require integration across multiple domains — from engineering and infrastructure to digital technologies, research, and finance.

At Eniverse, collaboration is embedded in how we operate. We constantly work at the intersection between internal capabilities and external ecosystems. Because, as I often say, innovation becomes real only when it moves beyond the lab and into an ecosystem.

My experience at Enivibes reinforced this even further. Turning a proprietary technology into a scalable business requires much more than technical excellence — it requires partnerships, access to markets, and complementary capabilities.

In the end, collaboration is what enables innovation to move from concept to deployment. Or more simply: technology scales only when partnerships make it industrial.
 

5. What role do you believe emerging technologies, such as data analytics, AI, or quantum technologies, will play in transforming traditional energy infrastructures over the next 5–10 years?

Emerging technologies will play a fundamental role, but their real impact will depend on how effectively they are integrated into industrial systems. We are already seeing how data analytics and AI can improve areas such as asset integrity, predictive maintenance, and operational efficiency — making infrastructures more intelligent and responsive.

At the same time, technologies like quantum computing — which we are exploring with Eniquantic — have the potential to unlock entirely new capabilities, particularly in optimization, simulation, and materials development.

But one point is critical: technology does not transform industries on its own — adoption and integration do. The real challenge is embedding these technologies into real processes, scaling them, and making them deliver value in complex industrial environments.

In that sense, transformation is as much organizational as it is technological.
 

6. On a more personal note, what has been the most defining moment in your career that shaped your leadership philosophy and your commitment to innovation and inclusion?

A defining moment in my career was the opportunity to contribute, at a very early stage, to designing the creation of Eniverse.

It started as a conceptual and strategic effort — imagining how a corporate venture building model could work and how it could connect technologies, competencies and markets in a different way.

What has been particularly meaningful is that, after contributing to shaping that vision, I had the opportunity to follow its execution — from the initial setup to the development of ventures, and today to the management of a growing portfolio.

Currently, working across multiple initiatives — including Enivibes and Eniquantic — I see very clearly what I mentioned earlier: the importance of a dual perspective, constantly moving between vision and execution. This experience reinforced a belief that guides my leadership today: real innovation happens when vision and execution coexist — not when they are separated.

Because in the end, designing innovation is only the beginning — what really matters is bringing it to life and making it evolve over time.