CRADA (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement): How the Process Works

A Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) is the specific legal instrument that lets a federal laboratory collaborate on research with a company, university, or nonprofit without either side having to route the relationship through a federal grant or procurement contract. CASRAI’s dictionary entry covers the operational definition; this guide covers the practical side: what a CRADA actually enables, how the negotiation and execution process works, and how it differs from the agreements research administrators encounter far more often — sponsored research agreements, material transfer agreements, and general (non-federal) collaborative research agreements.

What a CRADA is, and the statute behind it

A CRADA is a written agreement between one or more federal laboratories and one or more non-federal parties to perform specified research or development consistent with the laboratory’s mission. It was created by 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. Stevenson-Wydler established the broader federal technology-transfer mission (requiring federal labs to actively transfer technology to state/local government and the private sector); the 1986 Act added the CRADA authority specifically so labs could negotiate joint R&D and IP terms directly with a partner rather than only licensing technology after the fact.

Every major federal research agency operating its own laboratories — NIH, NIST, DOE, DoD components, EPA, USDA/ARS, NASA — has authority to enter CRADAs and typically publishes its own template agreement and internal review process. The statutory framework is uniform; the specific IP clauses, review timelines, and required approvals vary by agency and even by individual lab.

What a CRADA enables

The defining feature of a CRADA, and the thing that most distinguishes it from a grant or contract, is the asymmetric contribution structure Congress built into the statute:

• The federal laboratory can contribute: personnel, services, facilities, equipment, or other resources, plus intellectual property — but it cannot contribute funds to the non-federal partner. A CRADA is never a vehicle for the government to pay a company or university to do research.
• The non-federal partner can contribute: funding, personnel, services, facilities, equipment, or intellectual property. In practice, most CRADAs involve the partner funding some portion of the joint effort, or providing materials/expertise the lab doesn’t have in-house, in exchange for access to the lab’s scientists, equipment, and know-how.

Because no direct federal funding flows to the non-federal partner, a CRADA sits outside the federal grants/cooperative-agreement system entirely — there’s no Notice of Award, no 2 CFR 200 cost-allowability regime, and no SAM.gov registration requirement in the way a grant recipient would face. What it enables, functionally, is shared access: a company or university gets to work alongside federal scientists and use government facilities/equipment it couldn’t otherwise access, in exchange for bringing funding, materials, or complementary expertise the lab needs to advance its own mission-relevant research.

Intellectual property and licensing terms

CRADA statute gives agencies real flexibility in negotiating IP terms, but a set of conventions has become common across agency templates (confirmed against NIST’s published CRADA guidance, and broadly consistent with NIH and DOE practice):

• Inventorship-based ownership. Each party generally retains title to inventions made solely by its own employees during the CRADA. Joint inventions (where both federal and non-federal employees contributed) are typically owned jointly.
• First option to license. The non-federal collaborator commonly negotiates a first option to an exclusive, or partially exclusive, license — on reasonable commercial terms — to inventions made by federal-lab employees, or the government’s share of a joint invention. This is the main commercial incentive for a company to enter a CRADA at all: without it, a company would have no preferential path to actually using an invention the government funded.
• Government-purpose license. The government retains a nonexclusive, nontransferable, irrevocable, paid-up license to practice the invention for government purposes, regardless of who holds title.
• Protected CRADA Information. Confidential or proprietary information a non-federal partner submits under a CRADA can be shielded from public disclosure, including under the Freedom of Information Act, typically for up to five years from development — a real, statutorily-backed protection that ordinary interactions with a federal agency don’t offer.

These are typical, agency-template-driven conventions, not a single uniform rule — DOE, DoD, and NIH each maintain their own model CRADA language, and the exact license terms, royalty expectations, and march-in-style provisions are negotiated per agreement. Confirm the specific lab’s current template before assuming any of the above applies verbatim.

The negotiation and execution process

A CRADA is negotiated between the prospective partner and the federal laboratory’s technology transfer office (TTO) — at NIH, for example, each institute has a designated Technology Development Coordinator who is the required first point of contact. The process generally runs through the same broad stages across agencies, though naming and internal approval layers differ:

1. Initial engagement. The prospective partner contacts the lab’s TTO (or the TTO/lab scientist reaches out to a partner) to explore a joint research idea and confirm it’s consistent with the lab’s statutory mission — a CRADA can’t be used to direct government research toward work outside the lab’s mandate.
2. Concept proposal / statement of work. The parties draft a scope of work describing the joint research objectives, each side’s planned contributions, deliverables, and a proposed term (CRADAs commonly run one to a few years, with options to extend).
3. Drafting and negotiation. Legal and technical staff on both sides negotiate the agreement itself — IP ownership and licensing terms, confidentiality/Protected CRADA Information provisions, publication rights, liability and indemnification, and any export-control or foreign-national-access restrictions.
4. Internal review and approval. The agency reviews the draft against its own CRADA template and delegation-of-authority rules; some agencies require the lab director or a headquarters IP office to sign off, particularly for CRADAs above a funding threshold or with unusual IP terms.
5. Execution. Both parties sign, and the CRADA becomes effective on the date specified in the agreement (not automatically on signature) — work should not begin before the effective date.

Timelines vary widely by agency and complexity, but a straightforward CRADA that follows a lab’s standard template — without unusual IP asks or extensive legal negotiation — is commonly reported to take roughly three months from initial proposal to signature; agreements that deviate from the standard template, involve multiple partners, or raise novel IP questions routinely take longer. Using the lab’s existing model agreement language wherever possible, rather than proposing bespoke terms, is the single biggest lever a partner has over how long negotiation takes.

The Federal Technology Transfer Act also directs agencies to give special, though not exclusive, consideration to small businesses and to businesses that will manufacture products substantially in the United States when selecting CRADA partners — a factor worth raising early with the TTO if it applies.

CRADA vs. sponsored research agreement

These are the two instruments most likely to get confused, because both fund/support collaborative R&D between a research-performing party and an external party. The mechanism is structurally different:

• Who’s the research performer. Under a CRADA, the federal laboratory is one of the co-performers of the research, contributing its own scientists and facilities. Under a Sponsored Research Agreement (SRA), the research performer is a university, hospital, or other non-federal institution, and the sponsor (which can itself be a federal agency, but doesn’t have to be) is funding that institution to do the work.
• Direction of funding. An SRA is fundamentally a funding-flow instrument — money moves from sponsor to performer. A CRADA statutorily cannot move federal funds to the non-federal partner; if funding changes hands, it flows from the non-federal partner toward supporting the joint effort (commonly paid to the lab, or spent by the partner on its own side of the work), not the reverse.
• Legal basis. A CRADA exists only because 15 U.S.C. § 3710a specifically authorizes it for a federal laboratory to enter into. An SRA has no single federal statutory basis — it’s an ordinary bilateral contract, and its terms (IP, publication rights, indirect cost recovery, term) are negotiated institution-to-institution, not fixed by a technology-transfer statute.
• When each applies. If a company wants to fund a university lab’s research, that’s an SRA (or a grant, structured as a gift, depending on the terms). If a company wants to work directly alongside scientists at a federal laboratory — NIH, NIST, a DOE national lab, a military research lab — on a joint project consistent with that lab’s mission, a CRADA is the vehicle, and no other agreement type substitutes for it when a federal lab is a co-performer.

CRADA vs. other related agreements

A few other instruments sit near a CRADA in practice and are worth distinguishing explicitly:

• Material Transfer Agreement (MTA). An MTA governs the one-way or two-way transfer of a tangible research material with defined use restrictions — it has no joint statement of work and doesn’t involve the federal lab contributing personnel or facilities to a shared research effort. See CASRAI’s guide to the MTA process for how that negotiation differs in practice.
• Research Collaboration Agreement (RCA) and general Collaborative Research Agreement (CRA). These are umbrella terms for negotiated collaboration contracts between non-federal-lab parties — two universities, a university and a company, a hospital and a nonprofit. They have no single statutory basis; every term (IP allocation, publication rights, confidentiality) is negotiated freely between the institutions. A CRADA is the narrower, federally-defined case that applies specifically when one party is a federal laboratory.
• Bayh-Dole Act. Bayh-Dole governs IP arising from federally funded research performed by a university, small business, or nonprofit — the classic case of a federal grant producing a patentable invention. A CRADA is a different statutory regime: no federal award is made, so Bayh-Dole’s disclosure/election/march-in framework for grantee-owned inventions doesn’t directly govern CRADA inventions; CRADA IP is instead governed by 15 U.S.C. § 3710a and the specific agreement’s negotiated terms.

Frequently asked questions

Can a university enter a CRADA, or is it only for companies?

Universities, nonprofits, and other non-federal entities can all be CRADA partners — the statute defines the non-federal party broadly, not just as “industry.” A university research group that wants to work directly with scientists at a federal laboratory, rather than simply receiving federal grant funding, uses a CRADA for that purpose.

Does a CRADA ever involve the government paying the partner?

No. This is the core statutory restriction: the federal laboratory can contribute personnel, facilities, equipment, and IP, but not funds, to the non-federal partner. If direct federal funding to an external performer is what’s needed, that’s a grant or contract, not a CRADA.

How long does it take to negotiate a CRADA?

A straightforward CRADA using the laboratory’s standard template is commonly reported to take roughly three months from initial proposal to signature. Agreements with non-standard IP terms, multiple partners, or extensive legal negotiation typically take longer; adopting the lab’s existing model language is the most effective way to keep timelines short.

Who owns inventions made under a CRADA?

Each party generally retains title to inventions made solely by its own employees; joint inventions are typically owned jointly. The non-federal partner commonly negotiates a first option to an exclusive license on federal-employee or joint inventions, while the government retains a government-purpose license regardless of who holds title. Exact terms are agency-template- and agreement-specific — verify against the lab’s current model CRADA.

Is CRADA information subject to FOIA?

Confidential or proprietary information a non-federal partner submits as part of a CRADA can be designated “Protected CRADA Information” and shielded from disclosure, including under the Freedom of Information Act, typically for up to five years — a protection ordinary interactions with a federal agency don’t carry.

For the broader technology-transfer process this fits into — from invention disclosure through licensing — see CASRAI’s technology transfer process guide and the tech-transfer pillar page. For agreements that route funding to a university rather than pairing it with a federal lab as co-performer, see the guide on federal contracts vs. grants for university research and CASRAI’s guide to NDAs in research and technology transfer for the confidentiality mechanics that often run alongside a CRADA negotiation.