A new category of software and intellectual-asset businesses
Applications are familiar products, but the capabilities inside them may become more visible economic units. A developer could specialize in creating qualified DataChips for a narrow industrial task. Another company could assemble several into a specialized Circuit. A third could maintain a Circuit Genome that can be adapted to different equipment. A research institution could licence an independently verified method. Each participant could have an identifiable relationship to the intellectual assets it legitimately controls.
This could broaden the forms of software entrepreneurship available to a small team. It could also change procurement: instead of buying a complete, expensive software suite merely to obtain one capability, customers might contract for a defined function and bring it into their existing applications. The engineering burden would remain significant, especially for safety-sensitive systems, but reusable evidence and rights contracts could reduce duplication.