Dr. Andrew Rens is a researcher and consultant on technology regulation. The first fellow appointed by the Shuttleworth Foundation, Andrew has researched, taught and practiced open licensing since 2002. Originally trained as a lawyer, he was awarded a doctorate from Duke University for research on open licensing textbooks. Dr. Rens advises projects and startups that use open licensing approaches for innovation challenges that have thwarted conventional approaches. He has worked with social entrepreneurs creating open biotech, open hardware, open science, open educational resources and open source software in the US, UK, Costa Rica, South Africa, Mexico, Slovenia and Uganda.

Open licensing enables cooperative research and innovation. Strategically deployed open licensing facilitates disparate actors contributing their discrete knowledge to solve complex problems faster. It also ensures that research and development is never tied to a single approach but can take several simultaneous approaches to find out what works. Open licenses manage copyright, patent and related rights at all levels of an innovation stack, from data through software to hardware.

KEY EXPERTISE AREAS

• Open licensing
• Open Science Governance
• Knowledge Commons Governance
• Innovative approaches to transforming research into world-changing products