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.