Innovation is often associated with headline-grabbing tech giants, but the latest podcast from Fund Calibre reveals a far broader opportunity set across global markets. Graeme Bencke and Mikhail Zverev, Co-Managers of the WS Amati Global Innovation fund, introduce the fund’s disciplined framework that categorises companies as pioneers, enablers and adopters of technological change.
In this session, the managers also explain how they identify “innovation frontiers” where change is already being adopted rather than speculative future trends.
Why you should listen to the interview: This interview offers a grounded view of innovation investing beyond the hype cycle, showing where real opportunities exist across overlooked sectors like healthcare, defence and industrial tech.
It explains how disciplined stock selection can capture growth from technological change while avoiding overvalued or speculative areas of the market.
This interview was recorded on 14 May 2026. Please note, answers are edited and condensed for clarity. To gain a fuller understanding and clearer context, please listen to the full interview.
Interview highlights:
Investing in innovation the market hasn’t priced in
“We are a high conviction, highly active global equity fund. Our purpose is to invest in companies that benefit from innovation and technological change, but where that benefit is not fully priced in by the market.
“So in our view, the market is not efficient in understanding and pricing the implications of innovation, and we are capturing that inefficiency for our clients.
“We look for innovation across sectors. Typically, we end up with exposure to four to six sectors in the portfolio, but we naturally gravitate towards more innovative areas like healthcare, technology, industrials, aerospace and defence.
“It is a very active approach. Our active share is 99%, which means we are almost completely different from the index.
“We go off the beaten track into technically complex areas of innovation because that is where opportunities often lie. But importantly, we combine that with valuation discipline, profitability, cash generation and strong balance sheets.
“We often say we invest in good businesses, not science projects, not least because most of our families’ financial assets are invested in this fund alongside our clients. That creates discipline and a strong sense of risk awareness in everything we do.”
Pioneers, enablers and adopters explained
“We divide companies into three groups: pioneers, enablers, and adopters. Pioneers are the creators or inventors of innovation, the companies pushing the frontier.
“Enablers are the picks and shovel suppliers that make that innovation possible, and adopters are the companies that take innovation and implement it within their existing businesses.
“Pioneers are often the poster children of innovation. They capture attention first, but they can also be overvalued and overhyped.
“They are frequently financially immature, sometimes loss-making, and may rely on a single product or face binary outcomes. So while they can offer exciting upside, they also carry significant risk.
“Enablers, by contrast, are often already profitable. They supply components, services, or infrastructure that support multiple end markets. Innovation expands their addressable markets and accelerates growth regardless of which end-product wins.
“Adopters are more mature companies that integrate innovation into an existing customer base or infrastructure. For example, in healthcare diagnostics, a company like LabCorp uses new technologies to expand its test offering and improve its business model.
“This category is often overlooked, but it can be very powerful because it turns innovation into incremental, scalable improvement within established businesses.
AI opportunities beyond the mega-cap narrative
“No conversation is complete without AI, and rightly so, it is a hugely impactful area of innovation. We are pragmatic optimists on AI.
“We see very real applications today and in the foreseeable future, but we are not betting client capital on a full societal transformation or artificial super intelligence
“At the start of the fund, we did hold Nvidia, but over time we took profits when it no longer made sense to claim it was an undiscovered opportunity.
“We do not hold the Mag 7 because our process is focused on identifying non-consensus opportunities, not the most obvious names on the front page.
“Our AI exposure today is in the infrastructure behind it. Training and deploying AI models requires enormous amounts of data processing, which happens in memory semiconductors.
“It also requires extremely high-speed data transfer, which is increasingly done through photonics and optical communications rather than traditional electronics.”
Defence as an innovation story
“We have been invested in defence since the fund launched, well before it became fashionable.
“We saw that defence spending needed to rise and that the nature of warfare was changing, requiring a more technologically advanced response.
“We also recognised a structural tailwind: the West needed to re-industrialise its defence capabilities after decades of underinvestment. That creates long-term demand drivers for innovation in this sector.
“We focus on very specific areas within defence, such as drones and anti-drone technology, cybersecurity, and space-based systems used for intelligence and missile defence.
“These are highly granular, technology-driven segments rather than broad defence exposure.
“Importantly, we are looking through shorter-term geopolitical noise to focus on structural innovation trends.
“These companies are typically cash generative, profitable, and well capitalised, which allows us to remain invested through more volatile periods.”
Innovation is often hidden in medium-sized companies
“We are not just focused on the biggest future trends. We are often more interested in medium-sized transformational opportunities.
“One example is radiopharmaceuticals, which is transforming how we understand and treat disease at a protein level. It is leading to better diagnostics and new cancer treatments.
“Another is RFID technology, which is effectively the ultimate Internet of Things. It is being used across logistics, retail, and supply chains, and is moving towards applications like real-time inventory tracking.
“We are also seeing rapid development in machine vision, where industrial robots are gaining advanced vision systems, sometimes with multiple sensors acting like eyes.
“These are not always the headline-grabbing themes, but they are real, commercially deployed technologies today. That is where we believe some of the most attractive innovation opportunities sit.”
Conclusion: Innovation investing isn’t about chasing trends, but identifying durable businesses benefiting from structural change.
“The managers emphasise that many of today’s most interesting opportunities sit outside obvious tech narratives, and that long-term success comes from balancing excitement about innovation with a pragmatic focus on real, scalable businesses.
Past performance is not a reliable guide to future returns. You may not get back the amount originally invested, and tax rules can change over time. The writer’s views are their own and do not constitute financial advice.
This information should not be relied upon by retail clients or investment professionals. Reference to any particular investment does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell the investment.
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