CAMBIA seeks to remedy the historical disempowerment of creative thinkers in less developed countries, to create new channels of communication among throngs of diverse participants, and to harness their collective creativity through open-source tools of innovation.

Our Business Model focuses on these main tenets:

• Drive for transparency of innovation systems, including transparency of patents and intellectual property, which we provide as a reservoir of information about technology.
• Support the development of a protected commons of transformative technologies, and legal means and behavioural norms for sharing them.
• Provide the informatics and technological backbones and intellectual property support upon which the commons rests.
• Make savvy use of intellectual property information and creative thinking to develop useful and practicable genetic technologies.
• License these technologies to participants of a shared commons.
• Curate and facilitating the exchange of communication and innovation among participants.

Non-exclusive licensing agreements signed by participants maintain their proprietary ownership of the products they create, but will require that the techniques and components used to create these products be freely available to all other participants to use and improve. As in the open source model in IT, this will result in more products, increased competition, smaller markets and faster improvements.

Using our diverse network of partnerships, we intend to reinvigorate the world of life sciences research by providing new ways to steer around the thicket of patents currently stifling innovation.