Sunday, September 23, 2007

Encouraging patent filings by students

I had attended the Karnataka Student Paper Awards event in Bangalore on Sept 22, 07, and had a chat with some of the prizewinners. Some of the ideas I heard about were really cool, and had significant business potential. A student himself/herself might not think of a filing a patent application even when this would be a very appropriate thing to do. So, I looked up the web to find examples of university policies for encouraging student filing of patent applications. Here are some of the relevant links:

http://www.clemson.edu/research/ottSite/ottPolicies_patent.htm

http://www12.georgetown.edu/student-affairs/Intellectual%20Property%20Policy%205-4-06.pdf

http://www.hhmi.org/resources/labmanagement/downloads/moves2_ch11.pdf

http://www.senate.psu.edu/agenda/apr25-00agn/apr25-00agn.html

A few points I noted were the following:

a) Several universities/colleges are willing to cover the costs of patenting a student’s invention, if it arises from his/her work at the university.

b) Depending upon the extent of university’s contribution to the student’s patent, the university could ask for a part of the commercial benefits arising from the patent.

Obviously the educational institution could teach Intellectual Property Rights ideas and encourage students to write disclosures of inventions. They could have faculty advise the students on improving the application. The educational institution could also market the idea to potential licensees. I believe that efforts in this direction would be of great value as long as all this is done under well-written policies and guidelines, and is properly supervised. The institution could set part a sum of money annually for this activity, and spend it wisely by choosing inventions it wishes to be involved in as a party spending money on the patenting process. In any case, teaching on IPR topics, and consultation for students on their inventions could be made available separately, protecting student interests by a suitable non-disclosure agreement arrangement.

All of us interested in encouraging student creativity should share information about good examples of these practices, and on success stories of student invention.


Srinivasan Ramani