Deep tech – what does it mean?

Deep tech used to mean something to do with diving at depth in the ocean, and that meaning probably dominated until quite recently.* However, the term was co-opted to describe a different quantity around 5-6 years ago (I would guess) and has gained traction since.

One relatively early but well-developed use of the term in this second sense was (possibly) by Boston Consulting Group/Hello Tomorrow, citing De la tour, et al., 2018, From Tech to Deep Tech: Fostering collaboration between corporates and startups (I think it is from 2018, but it could be 2017). This report is worth studying and more attention should be paid to it.

Digital platforms and apps that arose during the ICT wave are so closely associated with the innovation hype of the past decade that they are often treated as being synonymous with the tech industry. Today, however, the main potential of platforms and apps involves their wider dissemination, rather than additional radical innovations. Consequently, investors are looking elsewhere for “the next big thing”

De la tour, et al., 2018, From Tech to Deep Tech: Fostering collaboration between corporates and startups, p. 6

In essence, deep tech signifies the quest for ¨the next big thing” and can be defined as a marketing term for that quest.

It would be perfectly logical for investors to pick it up if they believe the original premise that you can only make serious money from the next big thing and that ICT (or at least a major aspect of it) is finished.

It is worth saying, however, you can also make big money from sweating vintage innovation assets and indeed those assets might be the next big thing. As such, the BCG premise could be somehow arguable on a basic business level.

The idea that IT is finished is perhaps indeed more plausible given we had 40+ years of mass implementation in most parts of the industrialized world and, therefore, everything that could have been wrung from it has been. But, surely, there are people who would disagree with that idea and indeed appear to believe computers have more life in them still, such as the promoters of advanced chips and AI.

However, it seems to me there is fundamental practical objection to the BCG premise in that it must be admitted that spotting “the next big thing” before it becomes “the big thing” is very difficult, not least because we generally have a poor grasp of what makes “big things” in general and they are not defined only by their technical features.

That is not to say someone will not stumble on the next big thing either through luck or cleverness or some combination of these and other factors. But this is the kind of ex-ante technological determinism that cannot really be defined by general principles, otherwise we would all be rich already.

It is not just investors who would be interested in deep tech, according to BCG, but indeed all citizens in developed countries (the rest of the planet seems not to be part of the vision). This is because BCG claim the next big thing will completely transform our world such as by solving ¨major societal and environmental issues and drive economic growth…creating new markets and re-industrializing developed countries.”

Who, indeed, would not want this wonderful thing, if only we could find it. BCG associate particular paradigmatic inventions with the concept of deep tech according to the following time course (p. 6).

Period of time BCG associate with big thing	Big thing
End of the 18th century	Steam engine
1830s	Railway and steel
Late 1800s and early 1900s	Electricity and chemistry
Early 20th century	Automobiles and petrochemicals
End of 20th century	Information and communication technologies (ICT)

But this doesn’t help us predict the next big thing unfortunately other than it would seem to strike every 60 years roughly on average with the 1800s being possibly a notably productive period for big things.

Regrettably, based on this time course, it would suggest we are doomed because we will have to wait until the end of the present century until we get something really good. But perhaps we can replicate the better performances of the 1800s, in which case, we might be OK.

Example

The recent topic that BCG associate with deep tech is ‘the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas microbial adaptive immune system’ – we ought to find out more about it.

CRISPR-Cas was invented by Prof. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Prof. Jennifer A. Doudna. The Nobel Prize was awarded to these two scientists in 2020 and perhaps the Nobel is quite a good indicator of general areas of interest for big things.

Certainly two recently awarded prizes to Prof. Tu Youyou and Prof. Katalin Karikó, signified things that were already known to be biggish, respectively, the antimalarial drug qinghaosu and the covid vaccine.

I say biggish but perhaps not big in the waving the hands around and banging the table kind of way, which might tell us also about the political and physical dimensions of bigism.

The inventions tend to come packaged in innocuous blister packs or tiny volumes of liquid, are invisible to the naked eye and produce no flashes and bangs, whereas the steam engines, power stations, chemical complexes and supercomputers implied by BCG’s historical examples are big and unsubtle and announce themselves as such. (But let us not push this line of thought too far…)

Objectively, though, there is still bigness here. Qinghaosu helps make areas of the world where half the population live safely inhabitable and economically productive, alongside other antimalarial medicines and counter-measures.

The covid case needs no explanation given it just reduced the severity of a huge global mass-casualty event right in front of our eyes (aided by immune-assays and the melt blown polypropylene used to make masks†).

The CRISPR-Cas example is of course not as clear cut because bigness did not yet reveal itself but that is not to deny it has promise.

The Nobel Foundation refers to CRISPR-Cas as “molecular scissors” that can be used to edit genetic code “over a few weeks” and indicate the crucial development occurred in 2012.

As such we could say that CRISPR-Cas is part of a suite of tools that have been developed to edit nucleic acid and thereby, in theory, genetically engineer living things as well as viruses. In principle, these techniques have wide applicability. In reality, the story is more equivocal.

It has for example previously proved difficult to engineer major crop plants by any known molecular methods because of the complex genetic systems that they exhibit. Monsanto investors discovered this at great cost in R&D over the past 40 years; in the end, all they could manage to monetize were two simple modifications.††

Years of fiddly university-type research exploring the biology of gene expression in crops, based on creative thinking and intuition, does not provide a scalable solution amenable to brute force capital and produces few financial gains because it is like peeling an onion layer by layer.

Whether the CRISPR-Cas could change this situation is not clear to me. One probable argument – because CRISPR-Cas is said to be so easy and cheap compared to older methods, one can do rapid, mass experiments thereby possibly grinding down on the complexity of crop genomes by trial and error. This makes it amenable to massed capital which does scale, an important consideration, and again we see literal bigness in a giant robotic molecular biology lab.

I am not therefore making a paradigmatic statement that we will not succeed because I cannot predict the future. But as far as I understand no products are available on the market yet.

Some scientists have perhaps rather given up on the major staple crops because they are too complicated and now cast around for obscurer varieties like Camelina sativa that no one actually uses but which they believe are simpler to modify (long ago, C. sativa was a source of oil for oil lamps).

If this line of research proposes radical changes to human diet away from the staples that are too difficult to modify, to crops that we can edit easily, then I guess it could qualify as a “big thing”. But in other terms, by preserving and even extending the monopoly of large agribusiness firms that wield the technology, it would also maintain the status quo and therefore would not be a revolutionary development for society as a whole.

It is not overall clear to me what problem CRISPR-Cas is intended to fix in the food system although climate change might make it difficult to grow the usual of crops, other competitor methods besides CRISPR-Cas exist for feeding the world.

It seems another claim for advantage revolves around CRISPR-Cas getting around existing prohibitions of GM crops. But this seems a piece of unproven regulatory sophistry and the green movement are very much alert to it. In any case, the Monsanto example shows that crop genome complexity holds back the technology even before the green movement.

Perhaps there has been relatively greater success in bacteria in fermentation vats, leading to the development of specific products, but this is not a topic I looked into yet.

Relief of rare genetic diseases would of course be of inestimable humanitarian value to those who suffer from them and should receive our support but I suspect it could not really qualify as completing reshaping society as implied in the BCG definition.

At base, we come back to the problem of not really knowing what makes a “big thing” in general and therefore it is difficult to assimilate the data in a meaningful way and make assessments.

This is obviously mainly a concern for the strategic long-term mind, as opposed to the bubble investor who intends to flip at the soonest profitable opportunity.

The historical examples cited as big things by BCG like “chemistry” could be unpacked and somehow compared to putative next big things such as CRISPR-Cas.

Legal definition

It seems to me a comprehensive legal definition of deep tech would be an important democratic intervention, given we are seeing so many policies developed at cost to citizens, to promote a goal (e.g., New European Innovation Agenda).

However, taking the EU case, it is quite hard to pin down a practical definition on what it means to policymakers, based on documents in EUR-Lex. The following might give clues, or at least this is where I gather information on this point, and hopefully then it will be possible to assemble at least a composite definition from various documents.

Some of the essential prospective definitions, such as the idea that deep tech innovations are the key to Europe’s future growth, would seem to be matters that can be and often are subject to vigorous democratic debate because they concern matters that are not yet known. Therefore, it would be productive to ask if and how that debate is acknowledged in EU policy documents.

A second line of thought holds that deep tech innovation are founded on a scientific discovery or meaningful engineering innovation. In other words, in my language, that they could emerge from esoteric scientific knowledge as, of course, would be expected from the linear model. This is probably a relatively narrow field of inventions in many fields, which would more probably emerge from trial and error, guesses, luck, experience and so on.

However, it seems to be a key aspect of the deep tech argumentation that the linear model is likely to become more salient as well as a desire to uncover financial value in public investments in science and research.

Two other notions seem important, namely, the high “technological risk” which will have to be born by the taxpayer, but (apparently) without any clearly defined gain for the taxpayer such as ownership. This seems an obvious field for democratic intervention but perhaps we could better understand what is meant by technological risk.

Finally, that it will rely on complex combinations of various technologies, digital transformation and intangible assets. How these combinations might be assembled and sustained would be obvious questions calling for some kind of explicit legal framework.

Document	Definition
COM/2018/436 final	‘…innovations with high technological risks (‘deep tech’)…innovations that are key to Europe’s future growth…[w]here the market does not provide viable financial solutions [and where] public support should provide for a specific risk-sharing mechanism, bearing more if not all of the initial risk of potential breakthrough market-creating innovations to attract alternate private investors in a second stage, as operations unfold and the risk is lowered’
COM/2018/237 final	‘deep-tech startups (founded on scientific discovery or engineering)’
SWD/2018/314 final	Innovation, in particular disruptive, will increasingly rely on complex combinations of various technologies, digital transformation and intangible assets. This new wave of much deeper and transformative innovations will merge digital with physical and will go more and more into ‘deep tech’…R&I activities with medium and long-term innovation cycles such us deep tech…”Deep tech” refers to companies of any sector that are “founded on a scientific discovery or meaningful engineering innovation”.
SWD/2018/307 final	This is even truer for start-ups carrying out breakthrough innovation 114 and for the science-based 115 ones (“deep tech”

*This is not a comprehensive scan of the use of the term. Searching Google Scholar, the earliest reference to the term (closest to its current sense) was around 2016; Schaede and Shimizu (2022) state the term “was coined in the 2010s in venture capital circles” implying it could date back more than a decade. ‘Deep technical change’ might have had longer currency referring to something like significant technical change which is apposite to the current use and informs us that the idea is not as such new (I would try to put together a bibliography of this and related terms but it will not be soon unfortunately). Other meanings of ‘deep tech’ emerge if you search Google Books, such as on pp. 219-221 of a 2005 book called The enchantments of technology by Lee Worth Bailey, where ‘deep technology’ seems to equate to ethical technology (I think).

†The former is traceable to inventions by Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson, the latter by Van A. Wente.

††Reynolds and Szerszynski, 2012, ‘Contested agro-technological futures: the GMO and the construction of European space’, in: Exploring Central and Eastern Europe’s Biotechnology Landscape, is informative on this topic.