Intellectual Property Instruments in Technology Races

Emerging technologies are increasingly contested in technology races, not only between firms competing to develop and commercialize them, but between states for whom these technologies have become matters of industrial and geopolitical strategy. In these technology races, intellectual property (IP) appears to serve not only as a legal protection mechanism but also as part of a broader set of instruments that actors strategically deploy. Firms appropriate, access, transfer, enforce, and leverage IP through mechanisms such as R&D collaborations, patents, licensing, joint ventures, litigation, and patent pools. And states do more than set the background legal framework: through IP regulation, industrial policy, public funding, and technology-related regulation, they shape the ecosystem for the technologies and can steer the direction of a race. Yet we still know relatively little about how these IP instruments are used in technology races.

This research project investigates the role of IP instruments in technology races from a perspective that goes beyond appropriation alone. It develops a framework of IP instruments and uses the global lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery race (c. 1996-2026) as a case study to ask which instruments firms and states use, how these can be structured, and how their use shapes a race as it evolves. The aim is a more systematic understanding of the strategic role of IP in technology races.

The project is conducted in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Project lead: Nick Wellen (nw505@cam.ac.uk).

Project team: Prof. Dr. Frank Tietze (Cambridge), Nick Wellen (Cambridge/TUM), David Fiedler (TUM)