For Faculty, Staff, and Students
Disclose your innovation to automatically enter the annual IDEA Awards and trigger a review by OIPC and the IP Committee to evaluate its commercial potential. If the University declines to pursue it, full ownership reverts to you. Next, collaborate to protect your intellectual property through a patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret, we'll then bring it to market by licensing to an existing business or a new startup. Finally, enjoy the financial rewards: you keep 100% of the first $10,000 in royalties, followed by a 50/50 net revenue split with the University.
Policies regarding UAF's intellectual property can be found in your Collective Bargaining Agreement. Current CBA's are available online at UA's Labor and Employee Relations.
The Board of Regents Policies and Regulations Chapter 10.07.050. Inventions, Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks and Other Intellectual Properties outlines how and why OIPC and UAF encourage and support innovation and creativity by employees and students.
Faculty can find how inventions and other creative works demonstrate evidence of excellence in Research, Scholarly and Creative Activity at the University Policies and Procedure Faculty Blue Book
For more information please contact us!
When submitting a disclosure, your invention automatically gets entered into the annual invention competition, which recognizes the best innovations developed at UAF and UAS by faculty, staff, and students. More information can be found on the awards page.
For more information concerning U.S. Patent and Trademark and Copyright Resources, see below:
- Main USPTO Inventor and Entrepreneur Resource Site
- Patent and trademark resource Center (PTRC) – Fairbanks, Alaska – Mather Library, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Phone: 907-474-2636
- Search for Patent Agents/Attorneys on the USPTO website
- Patent Pro Bono Program within the USPTO
- Other information-
- General USPTO information concerning patents
- PDF outlining Basic Facts About Trademarks from the USPTO
- https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/patent-basics/types-patent-applications/provisional-application-patent- USPTO
- Nonprovisional (Utility) Patent Application Filing Guide
- Intellectual Property Awareness Assessment Tool - USPTO
The Route to Licensing - Simplified
The tech transfer process can take many different paths. The diagram below illustrates one common route in which a research disclosure may eventually lead to royalty income for the innovators.
Once research from UAF or UAS is disclosed to the Office of Intellectual Property and Commercialization (OIPC), it enters an initial phase of intellectual property and market analysis. The findings from this phase are shared with the Intellectual Property Advisory Committee (IPAC). Based on this evaluation, IPAC and OIPC determine whether the innovation is ready to proceed with assignment to the Nanook Innovation Corporation (NIC), or if additional data or continued monitoring is needed. This decision is communicated to the innovator. If the assignment moves forward, OIPC develops a more in-depth marketing and intellectual property protection strategy. The innovation is then actively marketed—typically for about 90 days. If a license is negotiated with a potential partner, it is executed through a Nanook Innovation Corp (NIC) or Nanook Technology Ventures (NTV) license.
Innovators are informed at each key decision point in the process, represented by the dark blue rhombuses in the diagram below.
Nanook Innovation Corporation and Nanook Tech Ventures add great value to our commercialization process. Nanook Innovation Corporation is a non-profit organization with a savvy board of directors looking to foster innovation and draw out the University's best technologies. Nanook Tech Ventures has a board filled with seasoned business professionals and investors interested in helping small companies successfully bring technology to the marketplace.
