Resource:How to Change Your Campus' Student Intellectual Property Policies

Introduction

Changing intellectual policies on your campus can be difficult especially with roadblocks such as uncooperative department heads, or convincing universities an ROI would be more lucrative than owning the intellectual rights. Jeff Ackerman is an innovation fellow who let us know about his experience in changing the intellectual policies at his university. He received a 50 thousand dollar grant from the NSF, and went through an entrepreneurship boot camp sponsored by them. When he returned to his University,  he wanted to impart some of those principles. We’ll go through the steps he took to create this change.

Problems

First, we need to focus on the current environmental factors in the university. In Jeff’s case there were multiple:

1. Commercialization of every department giving the university an excellent revenue stream.
2. Government act allowed university to commercialize innovations.
3. Lack of motivation by inventors due to university owning intellectual rights.
4. Overworked technology development staff spread across many disciplines
5. Express license agreement was formed, but still had to negotiate with the university on many sections.
6. University leverages the fact that they paid for the patent over the inventors.
7. University focus on big hitters instead of facilitating many medium/small hitters.

Solutions

The first solution Jeff tried was to start conversations around graduate students and university leadership, however in Jeff’s case this was not successful. What he did find successful was finding the chief executive that was in charge of entrepreneurship or innovation. Once he found them, he reviewed IP policies from around the country and then made suggestions to which he worked with lawyers in order to make some of these changes happen. Some of the reasons he used to convince the university about the benefits of supporting projects in the Valley of Death, or the time between patent and commercialization, was the fact the university would be compounding returns by educating students and faculty, building serial entrepreneurs, and get a return on their investment. Right now, the university president has said ‘any projects that undergraduate students work on, they are allowed to keep their IP.’, but there is not clarity amongst graduate students or faculty.

Ideal State

The key argument to make is that there is potential for Universities to invest in the interim development of licensable and patentable technology to make them more palatable products. This requires a conducive environment between the time of ideation and commercialization. The biggest struggle is finding existing examples either on the University or elsewhere about University-supported and developed ventures. It is important for students to get into the conversation regarding this, and to help move the discussion forward.

Tips

-Find the graduate students, and/or office hours, and elicit their assistance.

-Find a faculty member that is receptive, and leverage them to make contact

-Focus on ways to encourage students and faculty to actively pursue startups