“It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it actually comes from a lab in Maryland. In 2018, Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, devised a way to turn ordinary wood into a material stronger than steel. It seemed like yet another headline-grabbing discovery that wouldn’t make it out of the lab. ‘All these people came to him,’ said Alex Lau, CEO of InventWood, ‘He’s like, OK, this is amazing, but I’m a university professor. Soon, it was ready to commercialize, and he licensed the technology to InventWood.