The Office of Research and Innovation, Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) conducted a seminar for the university's researchers and students on 'Getting Your Research and Invention to Market: Commercialization Strategies' yesterday.

The facilitator, Daniel H Bell, is a US Patent Lawyer and Chief Learning Officer at Bell Certified who teaches patent drafting, patent prosecution, and patent litigation processes to offshore teams working for Fortune 100 companies working for lawyers in the USA and EU.

He also pointed out the importance of Intellectual Property (IP) specifically patents with respect to commercialisation and touched upon a number of monetisation techniques such as joint ventures, angel investors, scaled development strategies, subcomponent manufacturing, licensing strategies, technology licensing pools, packaged license partnerships, and market prediction innovation.

The facilitator also covered a number of relevant issues, such as that some small and medium enterprises (SMEs) would like to manufacture their inventions or outsource manufacturing to third-parties which involves disclosure of technology where he highlighted that it may be risky to provide the design or technical details without patent or intellectual property protection.

He further encouraged students and researchers to create start-ups for the technologies that have been patented and also emphasised to have appropriate IP protection and discussed the importance of researching the existing implementers in your technology domain and anticipating the future path of innovation and placing patented bets along those various paths.

Understanding the players in your technology domain will also identify potential partners and future licensing opportunities, said Bell adding that one of the other ways to generate revenue from research outputs and inventions is to license the right to make, use, or sell while retaining the ownership of the patented invention.

As licensing may be the most profitable route for some inventors and the chances of generating income is high if licensed to companies with an established customer base, he advised inventors to seek legal advice before signing any licensing agreements, non-disclosure agreements, capitalisation agreements, and/or joint venture agreements since patent law and contracts vary greatly based upon jurisdictional enforcement.

UBD has filed 40 inventions for patent protection where 10 have already been granted and the university is also closely working with other partners Sengenics and Pixela to enhance research outputs. UBD also recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Mindless Education, a local tech start up specialising in innovative IT solutions for learning needs.

Source:
@BRUDIRECT.COM

by BruDirect.com

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