Intellectual Property Law - Legal Investigation
Abstract
This paper analyses how the legal structuring of intangible assets forms a central part of innovation governance in technology-intensive projects. Taking as its starting point a concrete research and innovation initiative in enzymatic plastic recycling, the text examines how patent law, copyright, trade secrets and company law interact to shape the legal conditions for commercialisation. The aim is not merely to identify assets worthy of protection, but to show how legal tools are used strategically to enable value creation while keeping legal risks under control.
The analysis moves from the core of the technology – a patented depolymerisation process and associated software (PlastiPredict) – to the organisational and contractual structures surrounding the project, including the choice to operate initially through an unregistered trading partnership. This makes visible how IP rights do not exist in isolation, but depend on a clear "chain of title", employment law rules on employee inventions, universities' claims to rights and active confidentiality measures under the Trade Secrets Act. The paper shows in particular how so-called "soft assets" – data, know-how and process parameters – can in practice be more business-critical than formal patent rights, yet at the same time more legally vulnerable.
The contribution of the text lies in highlighting the role of law as a governance tool in innovation processes. The law emerges not merely as a system of ex post control, but as a structure that actively shapes the business model, organisational choices and the direction of technical development. By connecting intellectual property law, contract law and company law, the work shows how legal uncertainty can be converted into strategic capacity for action through clear agreements, internal control systems and proactive legal due diligence. The work thereby illustrates how legal method operates in the borderland between research, entrepreneurship and commercialisation, and how legal design becomes part of the innovation architecture itself.
Excerpt
The venture operates within the landscape of microbial plastic innovation, a field centered on organisms that can degrade and metabolize synthetic polymers. The technological foundation rests on discoveries, such as the Ideonella sakaiensis bacterium isolated in 2016, which uses enzymes (PETase and MHETase) to break down PET plastic into its base monomers: terephthalic acid (TPA) and ethylene glycol (EG). This chemical recycling approach is distinct from mechanical recycling and has drawn significant commercial attention. One of the early commercial leaders in this domain is the French industrial biotech firm Carbios, which focused on optimizing enzyme-based systems for PET deconstruction and secured early intellectual property (IP), including Patent WO2014079844A1 (Patent 1).
However, in early 2025, Carbios announced a major reorganization, shifting its strategic focus away from complex microbial systems and leading to the wind-down of a specialized internal group focused on genetically engineered plastivorous bacteria. The researcher who led this bacterial project, Linnea, subsequently departed Carbios and accepted a faculty position at Chalmers University of Technology. Through a mutual agreement1 with Carbios, Linnea retained rights such as non-exclusive academic access to the bacterial strains and protocols developed by her former team. This transition forms the basis of the current initiative, leveraging technology that was partially deprioritized by Carbios, though the legal contours of IP ownership and access remain an initial constraint.
The initiative is a research and innovation project at Chalmers University, established following the researcher Linnea’s arrival, and is supported by Karin Ekström from the Chalmers Innovation Office. My mandate, provided by Karin Ekström, is to serve as legal expertise, conducting a reactive and proactive legal investigation to guide the initiative's management of its intellectual assets and project formation. The core technical asset we are analysing is the promising, engineered bacterial strain capable of degrading PET, along with associated protocols, preliminary data, software’s associated with the business and business intelligence. Based on preliminary analysis, the venture's chosen business idea is Plastic recycling and monomer recovery for B2B selling, specifically utilizing the enzymatic depolymerization process derived from Patent 1 to yield both TPA and EG, which offers a larger market potential than the single monomer output of the Patent 2 technology.