Establishing mutual understanding and trust in commercialisation partnerships is a key pre-requisite for commercial success of research translation. However, developing an overly rigid intellectual property (IP) Framework as part of the new Higher Education Research Commercialisation (HERC) scheme may hinder some potential commercialisation partnerships.
ATSE’s submission to the Department of Education, Skills and Employment’s HERC IP Framework consultation agrees that an IP Framework could support early career researchers and small to medium enterprises enter into commercialisation agreements with partners, and could help investors see the potential returns on their investments.
However, the Academy cautions that the huge variety in circumstances between each commercialisation collaboration means a standard set of agreement templates in a Framework are unlike to be robust yet flexible enough to be broadly useful for most partnerships.
Instead, ATSE recommends that the HERC scheme could support the development of robust IP agreements through less rigid means, including:
- creating an education program to teach all partners about the process of entering into commercial partnerships,
- develop guidelines to inform IP negotiations between partners,
- develop pre-negotiation tools to help relationship building.
Read more recommendations in ATSE’s submission.