With so much interest being shown by the world’s tech industry in deep tech, I thought that it would be interesting to take a look at the way in which we decided to elevate the concept of deep tech in order to help people and organisations take a more profound approach to the design of technology in a manner which honours humanity as well as achieving social and environmental impact.

Traditional Definitions of Deep Tech

The first documented use of the phrase ‘deep tech’ can be found in the The Practice of Technical and Scientific Communication (1998) Jean A. Lutz and C. Gilbert Storms. They provide a short interview with Mat Tavares, a Technical Services Operations Manager for Ratheon, who uses the phrase in relation to technical writing, a skill which requires engineering and scientific training and the ability to understand complex questions.

In 2014 Swati Chaturvedi provided a formal definition of ‘deep tech’ to define a new category of start-up which are built on tangible scientific discoveries and which have the ability to disrupt several markets. And in 2019 TechWorks expanded on this definition, describing the way in which deep tech companies “often possess fundamental and defensible engineering innovations that distinguish them from those companies that are focused on the incremental refinement or delivery of standardised technologies or only use business model innovation to create opportunities”.

In 2017 Holonomics and 1STi came together to understand the way in which we could develop a new generation of innovation ecosystems which could generate impact through overcoming the barries faced by traditional approaches to the design of technology, digital platforms and artificial intelligence. I wanted to move away from phrases such as ‘advanced tech’ and ‘hi tech’ as these did not reflect my own need for a deeper and more meaningful relationship between human, technological and ecological spheres. I therefore came up with the phrase ‘deep tech’ not having come across it before.

The Three Key Aspects of Elevated Deep Tech

While researching the phrase and realising that I was not the first to have created it, I still wanted to use it, and therefore our Deep Tech Network began to elevate the concept. I began by proposing the foundations of this expanded definition through the inclusion of three fundamental aspects:

1 — Lived Experience

Businesses normally spend all of their efforts measuring experience through the prism of quantitative and qualitative frameworks, rarely taking the time to contemplate the nature of experience itself. The philosophical practice of exploring ‘lived experience’ is a powerful way in which this can be achieved.

Working with lived experience in a corporate or organisational context is about having the ability to explore experience as it is lived, knowing that our external physical environments as experienced by us in our internal lifeworlds can differ greatly from other people who have had completely different upbringings. Being sensitive to our lived experience means changing how we design digital and cultural transformation initiatives, applying more nuanced, multi-dimensional frameworks and methodologies that come from psychology and philosophical practices such as phemomenology and hermeneutics.

2 — The Question of Being

Towards the end of the twentieth century people had ambivalent feelings towards technology, not knowing if it would be a force for good or for worse, for instance advances in biological engineering and the emergence of the surveillance state. The question of what it means to be human in a technological world is now more pertinent than ever before. While today’s technology is introducing us to new ways of experiencing the world through mass connectivity and interactions, mass production has led to an obsession with efficiency, seeing everything — including people — as resources which must be optimised.

For this reason, in our book Customer Experiences with Soul, we explore this great question of being in relation to design, declaring that “the most disruptive word you can use in innovation is soul”. Deep Tech solutions, as we define them, honour what it is to be human in our world and which disclose new ways of being in the world, reconnecting us to the sacred.

3 — Universal Human Values

The five universal human values of peace, truth, love, righteousness and non-violence have been discussed for several thousand years and can be found in the ancient scriptures of masters, sages and holy people. The values are universal, since their role is to help humanity to evolve and to guide people towards a better experience of life. They therefore describe the highest expression of humanity.

As Maria Moraes Robinson explains in Customer Experiences with Soul, “When we live our lives without human values we become disconnected from everything, and this is due to ignorance, because we have forgotten who we are and why we are here. We do not explore these deeper issues of who we are. This has led to us having a sense of separation on many levels — between countries, between colleagues at work and people in other social groups, between ourselves and nature ”.

In this present moment, our use of technology is exacerbating this sense of separation which is leading to conflict and argumentation. As Maria has explains, our current situation is paradoxical — people have both the desire to reconnect and the technology available to do so, but we still have a mentality of separation. The universal human values are the essence of connecting and relating to others, and given that they elevate our lived experience in the world and also our sense of being, they provide the most fundamental foundation for our conception of deep tech.

Our Definition of Elevated Deep Tech

In 2019 we realised that the work we were doing was so comprehensive that we needed to capture the deep tech frameworks and methodologies we were creating in a book. We published Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation in 2021, with the following new definition of Deep Tech:

Deep tech is the development of advanced technologies built from a foundation of human values by conscious ecosystems.

In order to help people understand what this definition actually means in practice, and to help organisations start to design and implement deep tech solutions based on our approach, we created the Deep Tech Manifesto with the following seven core principles:

The Deep Tech Manifesto

1. The purpose of Deep Tech is to use deep thinking to find profound solutions to complex problems;
2. Deep Tech combines analytical thinking and artistic consciousness;
3. Deep Tech creates augmented intelligence — the combination of artificial intelligence with conscious human endeavour;
4. Privacy and ethics are core elements of Deep Tech algorithms;
5. Deep Tech is developed by talented people who come from a rich diversity of backgrounds;
6. The values of Deep Tech are the five universal human values of peace, truth, love, righteousness and non-violence;
7. Deep Tech helps us to explore our world and ourselves in ever more meaningful ways, honouring what it is to be human in our world.

The manifesto points people and organisation towards a new relationship with technology which is not only based on achieving purposeful and impactful outcomes, but which also describes the depth of thinking and the philosophical dimensions of lived experience, artistic consciousness, ethical AI, the universal human values and the question of being, meaning and humanity.

The Amplified Organisation Blueprint

The final aspect that is necessary to take into account in order to fully appreciate our elevated definition of deep tech is the need for systemic vision. By this, I mean that our definition is framed within the context of our concept of the amplified organisation. Technology comes into being through organisations, and therefore technology can only be known to be deep if first the organisation is fully known — it’s values, authenticity and soul.

We define ‘amplified organisations’ as intentional regenerative businesses which are purposeful, engaged and hyperconnected. When informed by universal human values, organisations can become open to the ways in which the deep tech that they develop can help amplify their impact across ecosystems, society, and our planet.

By integrating strategy, design, platforms, people, value propositions, artificial intelligence and human values, our amplified blueprint provides a clear systemic path for the design and development new digital strategies in a manner which engages customers and which can be implemented in an agile manner across whole organisations and ecosystems and which are authentically purpose-driven.

So if we return to our definition of deep tech as “the development of advanced technologies built from a foundation of human values by conscious ecosystems” we can now fully appreciate just how profound this definition actually is. It shifts the focus away from the technology itself, to a deeper way of thinking about the systemic impacts of that technology, as opposed to just the surface solution that the technology is supposedly an answer to. Our definition encompasses the highest conception of humanity, the inclusion of the quality of relationships within the ecosystems developing the technology and the requirement for genuine authenticity of those people and organisations, designing, implementing and controlling the advanced technology that now permeates every aspect of our lives.

Further Information

To find out more about working with deep tech, please see Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation: How to elevate, scale and amplify your business through the New 4Ps of platforms, purpose, people and planet

References

Chatyrvedi, S. (2015) So What Exactly is ‘Deep Technology’​?, LinkedIn

Luz, J.A. e Storms, C.G. (1998) The Practice of Technical and Scientific Communication: Writing in Professional Contexts (ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication, vol 4), Praeger

Robinson, S. andMoraes Robinson, M. (2017) Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design, Holonomics Publishing

Robinson, S., Couto, I. and Moraes Robinson, M. (2021) Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation: How to elevate, scale and amplify your business through the New 4Ps of platforms, purpose, people and planet, Holonomics Publishing

Techworks, What is Deep Tech?, Retrieved 23/06/23