Watch:Twelve leaders from four IT companies, seven American universities and the Kauffman Foundation have adopted a set of guiding principles to address how to approach open collaborative research between universities and the IT industry. The expectation is that the principles will promote and accelerate innovation, shortening the time it takes to move from concept to development.
According to their press release, the companies and universities agreed:
* That intellectual property arising from selected research collaborations will be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use.
* To an established set of guidelines that address the rights of the participants and the public.
These twelve enterprises believe the principles will accelerate innovation and contribute to open software research across a breadth of initiatives, thus enabling the development of related industry standards and greater interoperability, while managing intellectual property in a more balanced manner.
Open source software and open standards jointly developed by universities, government and industry can create a powerful platform for collaborative innovation,
said Dr. John E. Kelly III, senior vice president of Technology & Intellectual Property for IBM.
These principles are based on a balanced approach to IP management and should stimulate additional joint industry and university research projects.
In August, IBM and the Kauffman Foundation, a private foundation that focuses on advancing innovation and entrepreneurship, cosponsored a University and Industry Innovation Summit at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. To accelerate collaborative innovation, current intellectual property barriers were evaluated and plans were drafted to support a variety of research relationships. Recognizing the existence of a complex continuum of possible research partnerships, the Summit team agreed to address open collaboration models, in particular instances where researchers will create and disseminate software knowledge freely to the public.
Pervasive acceptance of the open collaboration principles by other universities and the IT industry, as well as the development of guiding principles for other research agreements remains at the core of the Summit team’s continuing agenda. The goal is to shorten the time from the first spark, or idea, to the commencement of research on that idea.
Summit participants developing and adopting these principles include the Kauffman Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University (Penn.), Georgia Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (N.Y.), Stanford University (Calif.), University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, The University of Texas at Austin, Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel. Additional collaborators include the National Science Foundation, the Office of U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman and the National Academies’ Government University Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR).
Sources
- IBM, Kauffman Foundation press releases
- Open Collaboration Principles, PDF file