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Short abstract

What does it mean to build alternatives in practice? Examining prefigurative politics in science materialisation, I explore how lab to market alternatives shift the conditions of possibility for innovation systems, and what ‘doing otherwise’ reveals about the nature of alternativity itself.

Long abstract

What does it mean to build alternatives, not as utopian aspiration, but in practice? This contribution examines 'alternatives' through the lens of prefigurative politics (Monticelli, 2022), attending to the material and affective realities of enacting different logics within existing systems. Prefigurative politics offers a productive analytical frame precisely because it locates alternatives in the doing: in the organisational experiments, compromises, and everyday negotiations through which actors attempt to instantiate different futures in the present.

The dominant 'lab to market' pathway – organised around proprietary IP, venture capital, and private companies – has been naturalised as both the most efficient and the only viable route for science to have ‘real-world impact’. Yet this logic creates systematic exclusions: science requiring patient capital, high technical risk tolerance, or long development timelines struggles to find institutional homes, while successful ventures frequently experience mission drift from public good objectives. The paradox is acute: the scientific imagination required to tackle fusion energy or quantum computing is not mirrored in our institutional imagination about how to organise, govern, and finance these endeavours.

Drawing on ongoing empirical research across alternative organisational models (e.g. Focused Research Organisations and independent laboratory models), IP arrangements (e.g. patent pools and IP salvage), and financing mechanisms (e.g. thesis-driven philanthropy and blended finance), this work focuses on how enacting alternatives shifts the broader ecology of science materialisation – not just what individual innovations achieve in isolation, but how their presence begins to alter the conditions of possibility for the system as a whole.