Licensing intellectual property
Licensing is often the most effective way of controlling the transfer of technology from the University to industry. Licensing enables the University to maintain ownership, and therefore control, of its intellectual property whilst at the same time generating royalty income from the use of its intellectual property by industry.
If you think that the University's rights are being infringed by another party, please contact the Research Commercialisation team.
A licence is an agreement involving the granting of rights from one party ("the licensor") to the other ("the licensee"). These rights commonly control the use (for copying, manufacture, sale etc.) of an intellectual property right (eg, a patent, copyright material, confidential know-how, etc).
Technology currently available for licensing from Bristol is available here.
What RED can do
RED manages the licensing process whilst working closely with academic researchers. We will:
- protect intellectual property
- identify and approach potential licensees
- negotiate licence agreements
- provide post-licence administration including revenue distribution.
What to consider in a licence
The following are the key points we must address when considering any licence of University ip:
- Who owns the ip?
- To whom are we licensing?
- When does the licence start?
- What rights are we licensing (evaluation, production, sale, sub-licensing)?
- What services/products are we providing (sample products, software support)?
- Are we restricting future research activities?
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Is the licence exclusive, sole or non-exclusive?
- non exclusive - licensor grants any number of licences
- sole - licensor and single licensee can use the rights
- exclusive - only single licensee can use rights
- What geographical territories are involved?
- What applications/fields of use are involved?
- What is the duration of the licence?
- Under what circumstances can the licence be terminated?
- How is the performance of the licensee measured?
- What payments will we receive (fees, milestone payments or running royalties)?
- How and when will payments be made?
- Royalties as a percentage of what?
- Can the licensor use the university name?
If you believe your research results may be suitable for licensing please contact our Research Commercialisation team before you publish or in any other way disclose your results.