For universities & research labs
Do any of these questions describe you? Q: Are you a researcher trying to get your inventions out into the real world? Q: Do you have tech transfer responsibilities, and need help dealing with outside businesses? Q: Are you learning about valuable intellectual property in your institution too late to do anything to protect it? Q: Looking for innovative ways to build on the software you’ve already built?
Working together, Global Works Consulting can improve your:
Depending on your needs, an intellectual property assessment can cover commercialization potential, emerging market analysis, competitive differentiation, and technology forecasting.
In large research organizations, the potential of many projects is not always clear or worse, not acted upon. Global Works will work with you to create an inventory of existing intellectual property and to define commercialization paths for technologies with the best commercial potential. The elements of such an effort include:
- Improve channels of communication to learn earlier about promising innovations
- Ensure the IP is amenable to patents or trade secret protection, including examining the technology’s genealogy to determine IP ownership
- Assess licensing potential, time to revenue, and competitive advantage for each opportunity
- Determine priorities for external licensing, partnership, and strategic investment
- Analyze emerging markets and forecast technology evolution to determine the soundest long-term priorities
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We will work with institution-wide offices as well as individual researchers or research groups to get the licensing and tech transfer process to work. That task entails knowing:
- How to navigate the shoals of the bureaucracy (even your own)
- Innovative tech transfer models (such as open source software, tax-deductible research support in lieu of licensing fees, etc.)
- What succeeds in getting newborn technologies to survive and thrive with new hosts, outside the laboratory
- How to conduct due diligence on start-ups who want to license from you
- Sound strategies for setting up long-term partnerships with users of your technology
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Patent strategy
An institution dedicated to research and new technology needs a proactive patent strategy. Global Works can help you plan for long-term innovation and revenue sources, improve incentives and invention reporting among your research staff, and provide tools and resources for sound decision-making:
- Communication: Educate and increase awareness about IP commercialization for research and management staff
- Incentive system: Reward research groups and staff members that demonstrate commercialization success with shared revenue, professional advancement, and increased autonomy
- Process: Streamline procedures for disclosing, documenting, and legally protecting IP
- Infrastructure: Provide legal, strategy, and marketing support, plus analytic tools, with a simple approval process for in-house and/or outsourced capability
- Long-term planning: Seek strategic alignments among existing funders or partners and the research areas of existing staff
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Open Source software (and its cousins)
Universities have traditionally published their results for the benefit of the broader research community. Open source software and related approaches can help fulfill that traditional 
mission while still living in
the new reality of high-value intellectual property. Global Works provides specialized expertise in this still-emerging nexus of software, intellectual property law, cheerleading, and big business:
- Planning and reviewing open source campaigns (just releasing code doesn’t cut it!)
- Selecting appropriate licensing models (there’s more to life than just GNU and Linux)
- Designing or assessing IP strategies, including how open source affects licensing opportunities or potential equity relationships with start-ups (have you thought about anti-dilution provisions?)
- Establishing the infrastructure to support a portfolio of software distribution approaches, from academic publishing to free software, through open source and commercial licensing
- Measuring the bottom-line impact of open source campaigns on university objectives
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