Owning the Future? Histories and Futures of Intellectual Property in Deep Tech

Decisions about intellectual property in deep tech – what gets patented, licensed, pooled or kept secret – are mostly made ad hoc and in real time. They rarely draw on the long history of how other IP arrangements have worked and whom they served, and the people who hold that historical and legal knowledge seldom meet the founders, funders and policymakers making these decisions today.

The project treats the design of a gathering as a research method in its own right. With co-leads at Lund University and the University of Warwick, the team co-designs a two-day residential event in Glasgow for around 50 participants from history, law, science and technology studies, deep tech practice, policy and IP justice advocacy.

The event uses futures thinking, speculative design, systemic facilitation and historical cases such as patent pools and open-source licensing as prompts. Afterwards the team writes a joint position paper and builds an open knowledge resource of past and present IP experiments.