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As an Academic researcher, you seek out ways to share your innovations with others for a variety of reasons. Innovation without announcement or validation often is not adopted or does not attract sufficient investment to enter into public distribution.
Licensing should be thought of as an extension of your teaching activities. It is a shift in audience from individual students to the business community interested in including your work in a product or service or to form a new company.
A license is an agreement for someone to use your innovation under agreed terms and conditions that are amenable with the goals of the researcher and match the nature and development of the innovation.
UW TechTransfer licenses the intellectual property rights that attach to your innovation. The intellectual property may be a patent to an invention, copyright in software, trademarks and identifiers for your program, or may simply be technical information and data that is best managed by license agreements.
Fundamentally, licenses are meant to handle the expectations of innovators and users of innovation regarding the rules by which the innovation is to be shared. Licenses help everyone understand their obligations in a relationship and provide a resolution path should the relationship need to be adjusted.
UW TechTransfer starts licensing conversations with innovators by asking about the goals of the research project and the special considerations, nature and functions of the technology. The critical questions are:
- what licensing strategy will have the highest likelihood of bringing your innovation into use;
- how can we adapt to information we discover during the licensing process, and
- what level of involvement is the research group committed to in order to bring the work into public use.
Our core operations involve licensing rights to intellectual property owned by the University of Washington so that business ventures may develop products and services for the commercial marketplace.
UW does not have a one-size fits all model for licenses. Innovators are actively engaged in determining goals for the licenses and advancing the appropriate strategy to identify and engage licensees. UW TechTransfer employs a variety of business models and contract terms depending on the nature of the technology and transaction.
UW TechTransfer operates within the scope of risk, fiscal accountability and transparency that govern the operations of agencies of the State of Washington. As an educational institution, we undertake risks appropriate to those expected by the citizens of Washington State and these differ from those of commercial entities.
To discuss your innovation with UW TechTransfer either contact our office by phone or tell us about your innovation via our online forms
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