I was particularly keen to attend the panel discussion around the Adoption and Commercialisation Barriers of Future Materials. Emily Weal of Keltie LLP rightly communicated the importance of an IP strategy from the outset. It helps to ensure a return on what is inevitably a massive development cost investment, especially when creating truly ground-breaking innovations. Without IP, many novel materials would almost certainly never make it out of university labs.
But the reality is that patents can stifle innovation and limit the adoption of new stuff. A useful analogy is the development of 3D printing. SLA was patented in 1986 by 3D Systems, SLS in 1988 and Stratasys patented FDM in 1989. Roll on 20 years and the explosion in consumer and prosumer machines and material development only occurred when the patents around the 3 main core printing technologies, FDM, SLA and SLS, all expired. Why? Because the extremely strong patents that protect truly novel technology stop anyone else finding ways around the patents to compete with similar technology in the same market space. The incumbents, 3D Systems and Stratasys did commercialise their respective technologies, but the lack of competition meant that they had no need to consider low-cost options or to explore material options beyond the needs of their target market sectors which tended to be focused on high value applications. As a result, their machines had six-figure price tags, and the material palette was limited.
That’s fine for a new technology where the impact of a 20-year delay to mass-utilisation is mostly just commercial. It could be argued that it didn’t really matter that we had to wait 20 years for the ability to print little model tugboats in our own homes. Conversely, it has also been argued that the delay will have left many innovative ideas stillborn as cheap 3D printers have been one major catalyst for the democratisation of invention.
My concern is that the planet can’t wait 20 years to, for example, apply bio-based alternatives to fossil-fuel plastics on a global scale. We need production of these materials to scale rapidly to the point that they are readily available at a cost that allows wholesale material replacement of every fossil-fuel based plastic product on the planet.
I’m certain that most of the current bio-material innovators feel the same and do not want to limit the application of their materials. Most are doing what they are doing because they want to help fix the planet. But sometimes market limits are imposed upon them.
I also attended the 5-minute presentations given by the start-up competition winners from within the UK Research and Innovation Sustainable Bio-based Materials and Manufacture (SusBioMM) programme. An amazing set of developments almost all of which have been derived from bio-waste by-products. All of course need substantial further investment before they see revenue and I worry about the strings attached to that investment. Some of the cohorts were doing deals with brands/OEMs as launch customers with some degree of exclusivity in order that the investors could lever first-to-market value from the application of a truly sustainable material.
However, what the planet needs is for these start-ups to be able to focus on scaling production of raw material to be available on the open market. Unfortunately, that’s a commodity approach that must wait until the early adoption market has had its exclusive bite of the pie.
Back to the panel session and one observation that was highly pertinent was that investment in both low TRLs and investment in growth (late TRLs) is reasonably healthy, not least because it’s a stated focus of the current UK government. But investment in the mid-TRLs to help start-ups to survive the ‘chasm of doom’ is almost entirely missing now. What choice then do these amazing bio-material start-ups have other than to take the money and accept that the Earth will just have to wait a bit longer to be saved?