Patent Licensing & Cooperative Research and Development Agreements
Joint research and development arrangements can generate results that none of the participants could ever hope to achieve alone. Often, however, the process involves teaching your research partner quite a lot about those aspects of your own technology that give your company its competitive advantage. Yet, reasonably broad sharing of information is essential to a successful joint development effort. One key to success - besides carefully picking a research partner - is to allocate rights to the research results - the foreground technology - in a way that leaves all participants comfortable that they are not creating new competitors. To achieve this, general knowledge of intellectual property rights is essential, but only takes the parties to the point where they understand the bare legal risks. Negotiators need to have thoroughly done their homework so that they understand each participant's business model and technology. Only then can a fair allocation of rights be made. Once rights to the research results are meaningfully allocated, the parties can achieve the degree of comfort required to share enough proprietary information to make the effort mutually beneficial.
Representative experience/technologies:
- Adhesive film
- Analog-to-digital conversion methods
- Catheter coating technology
- Confection injection methods
- Consumer product manufacturing machinery
- Display technology
- Electrophoretic ink
- Front plane laminates - displays
- Keypad technology
- Microfluidic-based DNA sequencing
- Microprocessing chip fabrication
- Network appliances
- Neurochemicals
- Optical network multiplexing technology
- Photoluminescent materials
- Rubber recycling methods
- Software - contextual telecommunications access methods
- Software - energy
- Software - parts sales methods
- Software - proposal preparation
- Software - sports video database
- Software - streaming video control
- Sports equipment materials
- Telecommunications technology
- Transportation technology
- Visco-elastic foam
- Video database methods
- X-ray technology for inspection of electronic parts