Science tools and technologies today are a black box - researchers don’t have access to their designs or are not allowed to modify them. This makes it difficult to customise them, often involving delays and prohibitive costs, as well as excluding developing countries from accessing new technologies. Increasingly, over the last five years academics around the world have been building hardware and sharing their designs online for anyone to freely use, modify, and commercialise.

What are the opportunities and the challenges of open hardware practice in academic settings? Who benefits and how? And what are the risks? This lunch with impact will hear from teams developing open hardware at the University of Bath and from the University’s Technology Transfer Team how open hardware fits with the University’s commercialisation approach

Faciltators

The event will be facilitated by Julieta Arancio, Department of Physics, with contributions from Dr Richard Bowman, Department of Physics, Dr Samuel Bull, Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Natalie Harker, Technology Transfer Manager in the Department of Research and Innovation Services.

Lunch with Impact Workshops

This workshop is part of a series funded by the University’s HEIF and EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), to support researchers in identifying, generating, evidencing and achieving impact from their research. Sessions are designed to enable attendees to apply the information, knowledge and tools to their own research.