™️ ©️ ®️ Universities and Public Research Institutes (PRIs) frequently work in collaboration with businesses, governments or other institutions in order to exploit their research. Collaboration may take many forms, such as collaborative research between different universities/PRIs, or between universities/PRIs and industry, contract research between universities/PRIs and industry, or the free exchange and dissemination of knowledge and materials among universities/PRIs. In such circumstances, they need to establish collaboration agreements that safeguard their rights to continue to use existing IP and to exploit the IP that arises from research.

Any IP-related issues need to be clarified in early stages of discussions with an industry sponsor or commercialization partner. This includes confidentiality issues, ownership of IP and conflicts of interest. Each party therefore needs to have a good understanding of the processes and policies that the institution has in place to manage collaborative research.