Dictionary domainTrack E
Technology transfer and commercialization
Patents, licensing agreements, IP disclosures, and university–industry deal terms.
Terms in this domain
34 terms
Patent Pool
A patent pool is an arrangement among two or more independent patent holders -- which can include a university technology transfer office -- to combine a defined set of patents into a single licensing package administered through one licensor or pool entity, so a licensee can obtain rights to every pooled patent in one transaction, with royalties divided among members by a pre-agreed allocation formula. Distinct from a standard bilateral exclusive or non-exclusive license, which involves a single licensor.
Reach-Through Royalty
A reach-through royalty is a licensing clause requiring the licensor of a research tool (an assay, screening platform, reagent, or similar upstream technology) to be paid a share of revenue from a future product the licensee later discovers or develops using that tool -- even though the tool's own patent claims do not cover, and are not incorporated into, that downstream product. It is distinguished from an ordinary running royalty by that gap: the royalty base is a product outside the scope of what was actually licensed.
Professor’s Privilege
Professor's privilege is the legal default, historically common in continental European patent law, under which an individual academic inventor -- rather than the employing university -- automatically owns the patent rights to inventions arising from their own research, including the right to decide whether to patent, license, or exploit the result. It is the structural inverse of institutional-ownership regimes like the U.S. Bayh-Dole Act, and today survives in full among major European research systems primarily in Sweden (the lärarundantaget, or 'teacher's exemption'); Germany, Italy, Denmark, Finland, and Norway have each abolished it in favor of university ownership over the past two decades.
Research Collaboration Agreement (RCA)
A research collaboration agreement (RCA) is a contract between two or more independent institutions or organizations that jointly and actively perform research work toward a shared objective, allocating rights and obligations among genuine co-participants -- as distinct from a sponsored research agreement, where one party funds a single performing institution's defined scope of work, and a material transfer agreement, which governs only the transfer of a physical research material with no joint research performed. An RCA typically covers background vs. foreground IP ownership and licensing, publication-review timelines, data ownership and sharing, funding/cost-sharing across parties, and liability and termination terms.
Non-Patent Literature (NPL)
Non-patent literature (NPL) is any published material submitted or cited as prior art in a patent search or examination that is not itself a patent or published patent application. It covers journal articles, conference proceedings and papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, technical standards, product manuals and datasheets, trade publications, websites, and even oral presentations or public demonstrations with a documented date. A document counts as NPL for a given invention when two conditions are both met: it was publicly accessible before the invention's effective filing (or priority) date, and it discloses subject matter relevant to novelty or obviousness. NPL is functionally equivalent to patent prior art in legal weight — a single relevant journal article can invalidate a patent claim exactly as a prior patent can — but it is indexed far less consistently, which is what makes NPL search its own distinct skill within prior art search rather than a simple extension of a patent database query.
America Invents Act (AIA)
The America Invents Act (AIA) -- formally the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, Public Law 112-29 -- is the 2011 U.S. patent reform statute that replaced the country's first-to-invent priority system with a first-inventor-to-file system for applications with an effective filing date on or after March 16, 2013. Under first-inventor-to-file, priority between two parties claiming the same invention goes to whoever files first at the USPTO, not whoever can prove they invented it first through lab notebooks and an interference proceeding. The AIA also broadened what counts as prior art to include public use, sale, or availability anywhere in the world (not just the U.S.), replaced interference proceedings with derivation proceedings, and created new post-grant review mechanisms (inter partes review, post-grant review, and the now-expired covered business method review) for challenging an issued patent's validity at the USPTO's Patent Trial and Appeal Board instead of only in federal court. For a technology transfer office (TTO), the operative consequence of the filing-date switch is that filing timing relative to any public disclosure -- a conference talk, a preprint, a poster, a journal submission, even a sales conversation -- became the single most consequential decision in the invention-disclosure-to-patent pipeline.
Inventor
Under U.S. patent law, an inventor is a natural person who contributed to the <strong>conception</strong> of at least one claim of a patented (or claimed) invention, as governed by 35 U.S.C. § 116. Conception is the operative legal test, not construction, funding, supervision, or manuscript authorship: it is the formation, in that person's mind, of a definite and permanent idea of the complete and operative invention, later reduced to a form a person skilled in the art could reproduce without further inventive work. A person who only executes another's detailed instructions, provides routine technical assistance, funds the research, or supervises a lab does not become an inventor by virtue of that role alone. When two or more people jointly satisfy the conception standard, each is a joint inventor under § 116, even if they worked at different times, contributed unequally, did not work together physically, or each contributed to only some of the claims — provided each contributed to the conception of at least one claim in the resulting application. Inventorship is determined claim-by-claim and can change as claims are added, amended, or cancelled during prosecution, which is why university technology transfer offices (TTOs) routinely revisit the named-inventor list as a patent application matures.
PCT Application
A PCT application (formally, an "international application" under the Patent Cooperation Treaty) is a single patent filing, administered by WIPO, that preserves an applicant's right to seek patent protection in some or all of the PCT's 158 Contracting States without having to file separately in each one at the outset. It does not itself result in a granted patent anywhere -- grant authority stays with each national or regional patent office. For a university invention, something qualifies operationally as a PCT application if it is filed with a receiving office (typically the USPTO, for a US-origin invention) within 12 months of the earliest priority filing (usually a US provisional application), enters an international phase producing a search report and written opinion on patentability, and is then converted into individual national or regional applications -- "national phase entry" -- by the applicable deadline (30 months from priority under the PCT default, though several major offices set 31 months). A TTO's PCT decision is fundamentally a triage decision: it buys roughly 18 extra months, beyond the original 12-month priority year, to assess commercial interest (licensee engagement, industry validation, additional data) before committing to the far higher cost of national-phase filing in specific countries.
Invention
In the university technology-transfer and Bayh-Dole context, an <strong>invention</strong> is a new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter (or a new and useful improvement to one of those) that a researcher has <strong>conceived</strong> — formed a definite and permanent idea of the complete, operative thing in their mind, not merely identified a problem or a goal (35 U.S.C. § 101; conception standard confirmed under 35 U.S.C. § 116 joint-inventorship case law). An idea alone is not yet an invention in the legal sense used by a technology transfer office (TTO): it becomes one, for disclosure and patenting purposes, once conception is complete and can be documented — typically in a dated lab notebook entry or an <a href='/guides/invention-disclosure'>invention disclosure</a> — even before the invention has been built or tested ("reduced to practice"). Whether that invention is also a <strong>subject invention</strong> under the Bayh-Dole Act turns on funding: 35 U.S.C. § 201(e) defines a subject invention as any invention of a contractor (a university, other nonprofit, or small business) conceived or first actually reduced to practice in the performance of work under a federal funding agreement. Only subject inventions trigger Bayh-Dole's disclosure, election-of-title, and government-license obligations under 35 U.S.C. §§ 200–212; an invention made entirely on private, unrestricted funds is not a subject invention even though it may still be patentable.
Inventor Recognition Program
An inventor recognition program is a formal, typically non-monetary or symbolic activity run by a university technology transfer office (TTO) or research office to publicly acknowledge faculty, staff, and student inventors for their contributions to invention disclosure, patenting, licensing, and commercialization. It is distinct from — and runs alongside — the financial royalty-sharing terms set out in the institution's intellectual property policy: a program counts as inventor recognition when its primary function is reputational and cultural (visibility, honor, institutional gratitude) rather than a payment obligation, even if it is announced at the same event where royalty distributions are discussed.
RTTP (Registered Technology Transfer Professional) and ATTP
RTTP (Registered Technology Transfer Professional) is an individual professional credential -- awarded in three tiers (Candidate RTTP, RTTP, and RTTP Fellow) -- that certifies a knowledge-exchange/technology-transfer (KE/TT) practitioner has met minimum thresholds of professional experience, continuing education, and demonstrated competency across six defined core competency areas. It is awarded exclusively by ATTP (the Alliance of Technology Transfer Professionals), a nonprofit standards body formed by a consortium of national and regional technology-transfer associations -- including AUTM in North America -- rather than by any single national association acting alone. An individual is RTTP-certified only after ATTP has reviewed and approved a formal application/portfolio; association membership, job title, or years of experience alone do not confer the designation.
Technology Licensing Office (TLO)
A Technology Licensing Office (TLO) is the name a research institution gives to its intellectual-property-and-licensing office. Absent institution-specific information, an office named 'Technology Licensing Office' should be treated as performing the same core function as a 'Technology Transfer Office' (TTO) -- receiving invention disclosures, deciding whether to pursue patent protection, and negotiating licenses with companies -- under a different institutional naming convention, not a categorically different kind of office. Some institutions choose the 'TLO' label specifically to signal a renewed or narrower emphasis on the licensing/IP-protection function relative to the broader industry-engagement and sponsored-research-support activities a 'TTO' label can imply, but this is a per-institution branding choice, not a standardized, cross-institutional scope distinction -- confirm actual scope from the specific office's own published mandate rather than inferring it from the name alone.
Prior Inventions Disclosure
A prior inventions disclosure is the exhibit or schedule attached to an employment, consulting, or IP assignment agreement in which an individual lists every invention they created before the agreement's effective date, using an affirmative yes/no format, so that pre-existing IP is documented as excluded from the agreement's forward-looking assignment clause rather than left ambiguous.
AUTM Licensing Activity Survey (LAS)
The AUTM Licensing Activity Survey (LAS) is AUTM's annual, voluntary, self-reported data-collection instrument that gathers standardized technology-transfer metrics -- research funding administered, invention disclosures received, patent applications filed and patents issued, licenses and options executed, licensing income received, and startup companies formed -- from participating U.S. and Canadian universities, academic medical centers, hospitals, and research institutions for a given fiscal year. A figure counts as LAS data specifically when it is drawn from an institution's own completed survey submission to AUTM (or from AUTM's aggregated published report or STATT database built from those submissions), not from an institution's separately published internal annual report or from an unrelated third-party estimate of technology-transfer activity.
Product Development Agreement
A product development agreement (PDA) is a contract between a company and a university, research institution, or individual inventor to jointly develop a specific product or technology toward a commercial outcome, combining ongoing development work with pre-negotiated terms for how the resulting IP will be owned and eventually commercialized. An arrangement counts as a product development agreement, rather than one of the adjacent instruments it is routinely confused with, when three elements are present together: (1) the parties jointly perform development work aimed at a defined product or application -- it is not a license of already-existing IP with no development obligation attached, and not open-ended research without a specific commercial product as the target; (2) it sets milestone-based development obligations (technical milestones, timelines, sometimes funding contributions) that both parties are bound to, rather than one party simply performing services for a fee; and (3) it addresses in advance how IP arising from the joint work -- particularly improvements, modifications, or new inventions built on either party's background IP -- will be owned, and how the finished product will ultimately be licensed or otherwise commercialized. A PDA is a general contracting concept, not a term of art created by a specific statute; its content is negotiated case by case, unlike a CRADA, which is a specific federal-laboratory mechanism created by statute.
International Confidentiality Agreement
A confidentiality agreement (NDA) between parties in different countries, which requires provisions a purely domestic NDA does not: export-control screening of the disclosed information for deemed-export risk, a deliberately chosen governing-law/jurisdiction/dispute-resolution clause that will actually be enforceable across the relevant borders, and, when the confidential information includes personal data, transfer safeguards that satisfy the data-protection law of the disclosing party's jurisdiction (most commonly GDPR Chapter V).
Pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102
Pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102 is the version of the U.S. patent novelty statute that governed patentability before the America Invents Act (AIA) took effect on March 16, 2013. It operated on a first-to-invent system: priority between competing claimants to the same invention was resolved by actual date of invention (conception plus reduction to practice, with diligence), not by who filed first, and disputes were resolved through an interference proceeding before the USPTO. It had seven prior-art/loss-of-right subsections, (a) through (g), several of which (abandonment, premature foreign patenting, derivation, and prior invention by another) were eliminated outright when the AIA replaced it with the current first-inventor-to-file version of § 102. Pre-AIA § 102 is not purely historical: under the AIA's transitional rule, any U.S. application that contains or ever contained a claim with an effective filing date before March 16, 2013 is examined in its entirety under pre-AIA §§ 102 and 103, so it still actively governs a real population of applications and issued patents today.
Technology Transfer
Technology transfer is the formal process by which discoveries, inventions, data, and know-how created at a university, government laboratory, hospital, or other research institution move into practical, commercial use outside that institution -- typically through patenting and licensing to an existing company, or through the formation of a new company (a spinout or startup) built around the technology. A given activity counts as technology transfer when three elements are present together: (1) an underlying research output capable of being protected or transferred (an invention disclosure, patentable invention, copyrighted software, biological material, or dataset), (2) a formal instrument moving rights or materials to an outside party (a license agreement, material transfer agreement, or equity/founding arrangement for a spinout), and (3) an institutional office or function -- almost always a Technology Transfer Office (TTO), sometimes branded an Office of Technology Licensing or Innovation and Commercialization Office -- that manages the disclosure, IP protection, and negotiation on the institution's behalf. In the United States, technology transfer involving federally funded research operates inside the framework set by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which lets universities and other recipients elect to retain title to inventions made under federal funding, in exchange for specific obligations including timely disclosure, a preference for U.S. manufacturing, and government march-in rights.
NNN Agreement (Non-Disclosure, Non-Use, Non-Circumvention Agreement)
A hybrid contract -- combining non-disclosure, non-use, and non-circumvention clauses -- used when a research institution or inventor discloses confidential technical information to a prospective foreign manufacturing or licensing partner, most commonly a China-based manufacturer, where a standalone confidentiality (NDA) clause is often difficult to enforce or insufficient in scope.
35 U.S.C. § 282 (Presumption of Patent Validity and Invalidity Defenses)
<p><strong>35 U.S.C. § 282</strong> is the U.S. Patent Act provision that (a) presumes an issued patent, and each claim of it independently, to be valid, and places the burden of proving otherwise on the party asserting invalidity, and (b) lists the categories of defenses available to a defendant in a patent infringement action. A fact pattern is governed by § 282 whenever an issued U.S. patent's validity or enforceability is being contested in litigation — as opposed to during examination at the USPTO, where no presumption of validity yet applies because no patent has issued.</p><p>Under § 282(a), the presumption attaches at issuance and survives even when the challenged claim relies on prior art the examiner never considered; it does not evaporate simply because a defendant produces new references. In <a href='https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/564/91/' target='_blank' rel='noopener'>Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership, 564 U.S. 91 (2011)</a>, the Supreme Court held that § 282's presumption requires invalidity to be proved by <strong>clear and convincing evidence</strong> — a heightened standard above the ordinary civil preponderance-of-the-evidence standard — and that this standard applies uniformly, including to prior art the USPTO never examined.</p><p>§ 282(b) enumerates the defenses a party may raise in a patent action: (1) noninfringement, absence of liability for infringement, or unenforceability; (2) invalidity of the patent or any claim on any ground specified in Part II of the Patent Act as a condition for patentability — in practice this reaches novelty (<a href='/guides/35-usc-102-patent-novelty-invention-disclosure-timing'>35 U.S.C. § 102</a>), obviousness (35 U.S.C. § 103), and subject-matter eligibility (<a href='/guides/35-usc-101-patentable-subject-matter'>35 U.S.C. § 101</a>); (3) invalidity for failure to comply with the specification, enablement, written-description, or definiteness requirements of <a href='/guides/35-usc-112-specification-enablement-requirement'>35 U.S.C. § 112</a>, or of § 251 (reissue); and (4) any other fact or act made a defense by the Patent Act. Indefiniteness under § 112(b) and lack of enablement under § 112(a) are both raised as § 282(b)(3) defenses, distinct from the novelty and obviousness grounds raised under § 282(b)(2).</p>
File Wrapper (USPTO)
<p>The <strong>file wrapper</strong> — also called the <strong>prosecution history</strong> or <strong>file history</strong> — is the complete official record the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) maintains for a patent application from filing through issuance (or abandonment) and any subsequent post-grant proceedings. It contains every document that passed between the applicant (or the applicant's patent attorney/agent) and the examiner: the application as originally filed, office actions (rejections and objections), applicant responses and claim amendments, examiner's amendments, interview summaries, information disclosure statements (IDS) citing prior art, terminal disclaimers, notices of allowance, and the issued patent itself. The term is a holdover from the paper era, when each application's papers were literally kept in a manila file wrapper; the record is now maintained and served digitally.</p><p>A document set counts as part of the file wrapper if and only if it was formally entered into the application's official record by the USPTO — informal correspondence, examiner's personal notes not made of record, and an applicant's internal drafts never filed do not qualify, even if they discuss the same application.</p>
Patent Continuation Application
A patent continuation application is any of a family of U.S. nonprovisional applications -- continuation, continuation-in-part (CIP), or divisional -- filed while an earlier-filed 'parent' nonprovisional application is still pending (co-pending), that claims the benefit of the parent's filing date under 35 U.S.C. 120 or 121 and 37 CFR 1.78. What distinguishes the three types is what changes relative to the parent's disclosure and claims: a continuation carries forward the parent's disclosure exactly and pursues new or different claims to the same invention already disclosed; a continuation-in-part repeats a substantial part of the parent's disclosure but adds new matter not found in the parent (the new matter does not get the benefit of the parent's filing date); and a divisional carves out claims to an independent or distinct invention that the parent disclosed but did not claim, typically after the examiner issued a restriction requirement forcing the applicant to elect one invention to pursue in the parent.
Freedom to Operate (FTO) Analysis
A freedom to operate (FTO) analysis determines whether making, using, selling, offering to sell, or importing a specific product or process would infringe any granted, in-force third-party patent claim in the jurisdiction(s) where that activity will occur. It is distinct from a patentability (prior art) search: patentability asks whether an applicant's own invention is novel and non-obvious enough to be patented; FTO asks whether commercializing a specific product infringes patents already held by others, regardless of whether the product's own contribution is itself patentable. FTO is jurisdiction-specific (patent rights are territorial) and time-bound (it cannot detect unpublished pending applications), so it is typically re-run before entering a new market or launching a materially redesigned product.
VC Term Sheet
A VC term sheet is a short, non-binding document, proposed by a venture capital investor and negotiated with a company's founders, that lays out the key economic and control terms of a proposed equity investment before the parties draft the full, binding financing documents (a stock purchase agreement, an amended certificate of incorporation, an investors' rights agreement, and related ancillary documents). A document qualifies as a VC term sheet if it specifies, at minimum, the round's valuation (pre-money and post-money) and the resulting price per share, the class of stock being issued (almost always preferred stock rather than common), the size of the investment, and the investor's proposed rights over the company post-closing -- typically including a liquidation preference, anti-dilution protection, board composition, and pro-rata (or preemptive) rights for future rounds. Because it is explicitly non-binding on the substantive deal terms (most term sheets carry binding provisions only for a narrow set of housekeeping clauses -- confidentiality, exclusivity/no-shop, and governing law -- while everything else is subject to definitive documentation and due diligence), signing one commits a founder to negotiate on the stated terms in good faith, not to close the round on those terms.
License Agreement
A license agreement is a contract in which the owner of intellectual property (IP) -- a patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret -- (the licensor) grants another party (the licensee) permission to exercise specified rights in that IP, in exchange for agreed-upon consideration, without transferring ownership of the underlying IP itself. A given arrangement counts as a license agreement, rather than some other transaction, when three elements are present together: (1) the licensor retains title to the IP throughout the term of the agreement, (2) the grant is bounded -- limited by scope (which rights: make, use, sell, reproduce, display, etc.), field of use, territory, and/or duration -- rather than an unrestricted, permanent transfer of all rights, and (3) the agreement specifies the consideration and other obligations attached to the grant, typically royalties, an upfront or milestone fee, sublicensing terms, reporting requirements, and termination conditions. Because the licensor keeps ownership, a license agreement is legally distinct from an assignment, which transfers ownership of the IP itself to the assignee; the underlying grant can also be exclusive (only the licensee may exercise the granted rights, even excluding the licensor) or non-exclusive (the licensor may grant the same rights to other parties in parallel).
USPTO Power of Attorney
<p>A <strong>USPTO power of attorney</strong> is the written document by which a patent applicant or patent owner appoints one or more registered patent practitioners — a patent attorney or patent agent registered under 37 CFR 11.6 — to prosecute a patent application on their behalf before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It is governed by 37 CFR 1.32 and, for applications filed on or after September 16, 2012, is typically executed on <strong>Form PTO/AIA/82</strong>. Under 37 CFR 1.32(b), a valid power of attorney must be in writing, name one or more representatives who qualify under 37 CFR 1.32(c) (joint inventors, practitioners associated with a Customer Number, or up to ten individually named practitioners with registration numbers), give that representative the power to act on the principal's behalf, and be signed by the applicant or patent owner. Only a registered patent attorney or patent agent — not a general power-of-attorney holder, and not an unregistered representative — may be appointed to prosecute a utility or plant application; practitioners registered for design patents only under 37 CFR 11.6(d) may act solely in design matters.</p>
Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA)
<p>The <strong>Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA)</strong> is <strong>proposed U.S. federal legislation</strong> — not current law — that would rewrite 35 U.S.C. § 101 to replace the judge-made "abstract idea" and "law of nature" exceptions with a shorter, closed list of statutory exclusions. It has been introduced, in varying forms, across the 116th, 118th, and 119th Congresses without being enacted. The current version, <strong>S. 1546 (119th Congress, 2025–2026)</strong>, was reintroduced on May 1, 2025 by Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE) and Representatives Kevin Kiley (R-CA) and Scott Peters (D-CA). The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held a hearing on the bill on October 8, 2025; as of this writing it has not been marked up by the full committee, passed by either chamber, or signed into law. A page that treats PERA as settled law would be factually wrong — its defining characteristic, for research-administration purposes, is that it is a live legislative proposal responding to an unresolved doctrinal problem, not a rule anyone can rely on yet.</p><h2>The problem PERA is written to address</h2><p>Under current § 101 doctrine, the Supreme Court's <em>Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories</em> (2012) and <em>Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International</em> (2014) decisions established a two-step framework (often called the "Alice/Mayo test" or, in USPTO examination guidance, "Step 2A/Step 2B") that lets an examiner or court invalidate a claim as directed to an unpatentable "abstract idea," "law of nature," or "natural phenomenon" even though those categories appear nowhere in the patent statute itself — they are judicial exceptions layered on top of § 101's text. See CASRAI's <a href='/guides/35-usc-101-patentable-subject-matter'>35 U.S.C. § 101: Patentable Subject Matter and the Alice/Mayo Eligibility Test</a> for the current test as it actually operates today. Critics across the patent bar, technology-transfer offices, and biotech/software industry groups argue the resulting case law is inconsistent and hard to predict at the claim-drafting stage, disproportionately affecting <strong>diagnostic methods</strong>, <strong>software and AI-related inventions</strong>, and certain <strong>life-sciences discoveries</strong> — exactly the categories a university technology transfer office most often needs to protect before licensing.</p><h2>What PERA proposes to change</h2><p>Rather than amending the Alice/Mayo case-law test directly, PERA's approach is to eliminate judicially-created exceptions from § 101 entirely and substitute a short, enumerated list of statutory exclusions from eligibility (categories such as claims to an unmodified human gene as it exists in the human body, or to a mathematical formula standing alone, are the kind of exclusion prior versions of the bill have specified) while otherwise stating that a claimed invention is eligible if it falls within one of the statute's existing categories (process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter) and is not excluded. Sponsors describe the goal as restoring eligibility for practical, real-world applications in fields like AI, biotechnology, and diagnostics without reopening genuinely abstract claims to patenting. Because PERA has been revised between reintroductions, the exact exclusion list and definitions in the live S. 1546 text should be checked directly against <a href='https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1546/text' rel='noopener'>the bill text on congress.gov</a> rather than assumed to match an earlier version.</p><h2>Why this matters for university tech transfer specifically</h2><p>A technology transfer office evaluating whether to patent a faculty invention has to make a § 101 eligibility judgment long before litigation is ever a possibility — at invention-disclosure triage, at the provisional-filing decision, and again when licensing counsel diligence the claims. Diagnostic-method inventions (a correlation between a biomarker and a disease state) and software/AI inventions (a novel algorithm or model architecture) are the two categories most exposed to Alice/Mayo rejections today, which in turn affects a TTO's practical calculus on whether patenting is worth the cost relative to protecting the same invention as a trade secret or relying on a first-mover/know-how advantage instead. PERA, if enacted, would not retroactively revive an invention a TTO already declined to patent under current doctrine — patentability is assessed as of filing — but it would change the eligibility calculus for inventions disclosed and filed after any effective date, and could affect prosecution strategy for pending applications depending on the bill's final transition provisions. None of that is triggered by introduction or a committee hearing; only enactment would change what is patentable.</p>
35 U.S.C. § 154 (Patent Term)
<p><strong>35 U.S.C. § 154</strong> is the U.S. Patent Act provision that (a) defines the substantive right a patent grants -- the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States, or importing it into the United States (and, for a process patent, the right to exclude others from using, offering for sale, or selling products made by that process) -- and states the length of that grant, and (b) authorizes patent term adjustment (PTA), which lengthens a patent's term to compensate for certain USPTO examination delays. A fact pattern is governed by § 154 whenever the question is how long an issued utility or plant patent's exclusionary term runs, or whether USPTO delay during prosecution entitles the applicant to extra term -- as distinct from patent eligibility (35 U.S.C. § 101), novelty (§ 102), the specification requirements (§ 112), or the presumption of validity in litigation (§ 282), each governed by its own provision.</p>
SBIR/STTR Data Rights
The specific FAR/DFARS data-rights clause package (FAR 52.227-20 for civilian agencies, DFARS 252.227-7018 for DoD) that attaches automatically to SBIR/STTR-funded contracts and grants, giving the small-business or STTR awardee exclusive control over the technical data and computer software it generates under the award. During a 20-year protection period running from the date of award (per SBA's SBIR/STTR Policy Directive and, for DoD, DFARS 252.227-7018 effective January 17, 2025), the government may use that data only for internal government purposes and cannot release or disclose it to a third party -- including a competing contractor bidding on follow-on work -- without the awardee's permission. This is a distinct protection from patent rights: it applies to the data/software deliverables themselves, not the underlying invention, and does not require a patent to be filed at all.
AUTM Better World Project
The AUTM Better World Project is a public storytelling and awards initiative run by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) that collects curated case studies of specific inventions, born from federally funded or institutional research, that were licensed and commercialized into products, services, or companies with a documented real-world benefit. An item qualifies as a Better World Project 'story' when it names a specific technology, traces it back to a specific research institution's technology transfer office, and narrates the licensing/commercialization path in lay terms aimed at a public or policymaker audience -- not when it is simply an internal TTO metric or a generic description of what technology transfer does.
Evaluation Agreement
<p>An <strong>evaluation agreement</strong> (sometimes called an <strong>evaluation license</strong>) is a short-term, narrowly-scoped contract that a university or research institution's technology transfer office (TTO) uses to let a prospective licensee test a specific technology — a device, material, dataset, or piece of software — before either party commits to a full commercial license negotiation. What makes an agreement an evaluation agreement, rather than something else, is the combination of: (1) a limited internal-use-only purpose (testing, benchmarking, or feasibility assessment — not manufacturing, sale, sublicensing, or use in a marketed product); (2) a short, fixed term (commonly 90 days to one year, sometimes renewable once); (3) non-exclusivity as the default, since the institution is not yet committing the technology to any one party; and (4) little or no financial consideration, since the point is to let the evaluator decide whether the technology is worth licensing at all, not to monetize use during the trial itself. Many evaluation agreements also include, or are paired with, confidentiality terms and a right of first negotiation or option period for a subsequent full license.</p>
Industry Affiliates Program
A standing, fee-based membership arrangement in which a company pays a recurring (typically annual) membership fee to a university lab, center, or department for a bundle of ongoing benefits -- ordinarily early or preferred access to a defined stream of the center's research output, participation in an advisory or steering committee that helps set the research agenda, invitations to networking and research-showcase events, and access to a student recruiting pipeline -- rather than funding a specific, deliverable-bound project. Membership is typically structured to grant a non-exclusive, use-only license to the resulting research output, not ownership or exclusive rights, which preserves the pre-competitive, multi-member model the program depends on.
ERC Proof of Concept Grant
<p>An <strong>ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant</strong> is a European Research Council top-up funding scheme, not a standalone competitive research grant. It is open only to principal investigators (PIs) who currently hold, or have held, one of the four ERC frontier-research grants (<a href='/compare/erc-starting-vs-consolidator-vs-advanced-vs-synergy-grants'>Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, or Synergy Grant</a>). Its purpose is to help those researchers explore the commercial or societal application potential of results already generated under their ERC-funded project — testing a concept, validating an idea, addressing a technical bottleneck, clarifying an intellectual-property strategy, or engaging early with potential users, licensees, or investors. It is not a mechanism for funding new, unrelated research: the PI must be able to demonstrate a direct link between the proposed PoC activity and the frontier-research project it draws on.</p><p>For the 2026 ERC Work Programme, PoC Grants are awarded as a lump sum of <strong>€150,000 for up to 18 months</strong>. Eligible applicants are PIs on an ongoing ERC main grant, or on a main grant that ended on or after 1 January 2025 — the ERC periodically shifts this eligibility window between Work Programme years, so applicants should always confirm the exact cut-off date against the current year's call documents rather than assume it carries over unchanged. Each PI may submit only one PoC application per call, and a single main grant project may receive a maximum of three PoC awards over its lifetime (six for Synergy Grant projects, reflecting their multi-PI structure). Evaluation is single-stage and assessed on breakthrough innovation potential, feasibility of the proposed approach, and the PI's strategic leadership — there is no separate peer-review panel structure comparable to the main schemes' two-stage process.</p>
University Intellectual Property (IP) Policy
A university intellectual property (IP) policy is the formal, institution-wide governing document -- adopted by a board of trustees or regents -- that establishes ownership of IP created by faculty, staff, and students using university resources, the obligation to disclose inventions, how resulting revenue is shared with inventors, and how those rules differ for federally sponsored, industry-sponsored, and unsponsored research.
