Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A DOE national laboratory and a private battery manufacturer enter a CRADA to jointly develop and test a new electrode chemistry, with the company funding materials and the laboratory contributing scientists' effort and specialized characterization equipment.
- Is an instance
A NIST measurement-science group and an industrial sensor manufacturer establish a CRADA to co-develop a calibration method, with the manufacturer providing funding and prototype hardware and NIST providing metrology expertise and test facilities.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A university receiving a reagent from a federal laboratory purely for its own independent testing, with no joint statement of work or federal-lab personnel contribution, needs a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA), not a CRADA -- the material moves, but no collaborative R&D is being performed together.
- Not an instance
A company funding a university's own research program, with the university (not a federal laboratory) performing the work in its own labs, is a sponsored research agreement -- CRADA authority under 15 U.S.C. 3710a applies specifically to agreements involving a federal laboratory as collaborator.
Editorial commentary
A Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) is a formal, written agreement between one or more federal laboratories and one or more non-federal parties — industry, a university, a nonprofit, or another organization — to jointly perform specified research and development consistent with the laboratory’s mission. CRADAs are the primary statutory mechanism federal laboratories use to collaborate directly with outside partners on active R&D, as distinct from simply transferring materials, licensing an existing patent, or receiving outside funding to perform research in a non-federal lab.
Statutory basis
CRADA authority comes from the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, which amended the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980 and is codified at 15 U.S.C. § 3710a. The statute defines a CRADA as any agreement between one or more federal laboratories and one or more non-federal parties under which the government, through its laboratory, provides personnel, services, facilities, equipment, intellectual property, or other resources toward the collaboration — but provides no funds to the non-federal party. The non-federal partner may contribute funding, personnel, services, facilities, equipment, or intellectual property. This funding asymmetry (federal lab contributes in-kind resources, partner may contribute cash) is a defining structural feature of the mechanism.
How a CRADA works
Individual federal agencies (DOE national laboratories, NIST, NIH intramural programs, DoD laboratories, USDA, and others) each maintain their own CRADA templates and internal approval processes under this shared statutory framework. A typical CRADA specifies the scope of the collaborative research, each party’s in-kind or financial contributions, a statement of work, publication rights (often with a short government pre-publication review period), and protections for proprietary information the non-federal partner shares with the laboratory. Under the Act, information a partner submits as part of a CRADA and clearly marked as confidential — sometimes called protected CRADA information — can be shielded from public release, including from Freedom of Information Act requests, typically for up to five years.
Intellectual property and licensing conventions
CRADAs typically follow a predictable IP allocation pattern, though exact terms vary by agency template and negotiation:
- Inventorship-based ownership: each party generally takes title to inventions made solely by its own employees; jointly made inventions are typically jointly owned.
- Partner licensing preference: the non-federal collaborator is commonly granted an option or a first right to negotiate an exclusive, field-of-use-limited license to inventions made by federal-laboratory employees (or the government’s share of joint inventions) arising from the CRADA, usually on reasonable commercial terms.
- Government-purpose rights retained: the government typically retains a nonexclusive, nontransferable, irrevocable, paid-up license to practice the invention for government purposes, similar in spirit to the government-use license Bayh-Dole retains over federally funded university inventions (see Bayh-Dole Act).
Because CRADA IP terms are negotiated per agreement (within agency-specific boundaries) rather than fixed entirely by statute, research administrators and technology transfer offices on the non-federal side should review the specific agency’s standard CRADA licensing article before assuming any particular allocation applies.
CRADA vs. Material Transfer Agreement (MTA)
A Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) governs the one-directional or bidirectional transfer of tangible research materials — a cell line, reagent, biospecimen, plasmid — between institutions, with terms addressing permitted use, ownership of the original material and any derivatives, and publication rights. An MTA does not, by itself, establish a joint research collaboration or a shared statement of work: the recipient typically performs its own independent research using the transferred material, and no party is contributing personnel, funding, or facilities toward a jointly defined project. A CRADA is broader and more collaborative: it establishes an active, jointly performed R&D effort with defined contributions from both a federal laboratory and its partner, and it may itself include a materials-transfer provision as one clause among many. The practical test: if a federal laboratory is simply shipping a physical material to an outside party for that party’s own independent use, an MTA (or, where the recipient is another federal agency component, an interagency agreement) is the right instrument; if the federal laboratory and the outside party are jointly conducting R&D together, sharing effort, facilities, or funding toward a common statement of work, a CRADA is required.
CRADA vs. sponsored research agreement
A sponsored research agreement is a contract under which an external sponsor (industry, foundation, or another entity) funds a university or other non-federal institution to perform research in that institution’s own laboratories. The research-performing party in a sponsored research agreement is never a federal laboratory, and the funding flow runs the opposite direction from a CRADA’s default pattern: the sponsor pays the university, rather than the non-federal partner potentially funding a federal laboratory’s in-kind contribution. CRADA authority under 15 U.S.C. § 3710a applies specifically to agreements involving a federal laboratory as one of the collaborating parties; a university receiving industry funding to conduct research entirely within its own facilities, with no federal laboratory involved as a collaborator, is a sponsored research agreement, not a CRADA, regardless of how similar the underlying science may look.
Who uses CRADAs
CRADAs are used across the federal laboratory system, including Department of Energy national laboratories, NIST, NIH and CDC intramural research programs, Department of Defense laboratories, USDA Agricultural Research Service facilities, and other agency laboratories with in-house R&D missions. Industry partners, universities, and nonprofit research organizations most commonly enter CRADAs to gain structured access to federal laboratory expertise, unique equipment, or facilities that would be impractical to replicate, in exchange for contributing funding or in-kind resources toward a jointly scoped research effort.
References
- 15 U.S.C. § 3710a (Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, amending the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980)
- NIST, Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) program guidance
- U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory standard CRADA templates and guidance
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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