Background

Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI), the national office with responsibility for the knowledge transfer system in Ireland, has a range of resources to facilitate interactions between industry and the research base in Ireland. IP Pragmatics worked alongside KTI and an expert group to develop new resources for collaborative research, which are aimed at making the process of contracting between companies and publicly funded research organisations swifter and more efficient.

 

Objectives

KTI has developed a series of Model Agreements and Guides which are freely available on its website. Whilst their use is not mandated, they provide a useful starting point and in many cases (whether used “as is” or as a guide) speed up the process of negotiation. 
KTI appointed IP Pragmatics to support the development of a series of Model Collaborative Research Agreements that can be used for contracting between industry and the research base:

• Model Wholly Collaborative Research Agreement
• Model Part Funded Collaborative Research Agreement
• Model Non Binding Term Sheet for Collaborative Research
• Practical Guide to Collaborative Research Agreements
• Joint Ownership and Management Agreement (JOMA)
• Practical Guide to Joint Ownership Management Agreements

Approach

An expert contracts group was formed to consider the development of the agreements and guides. The group included people from industry and the public research base with experience of negotiating collaborative research agreements. The group’s input, experienced points of view and guidance was critical to ensuring that the guides and template agreements developed were fit for purpose.

For the project, we also drew on recent learnings from our extensive university-industry negotiations of collaborative agreements and our international experience in similar templates including a review of the UK’s Lambert Agreements.

 

Result

The resulting agreements and guides are available now for download from the KTI website. They are already proving helpful for the companies and research organisations in Ireland.

http://www.knowledgetransferireland.com/Model-Agreements/KTI-Practical-Guides

http://www.knowledgetransferireland.com/Model-Agreements/Catalogue-of-Model-Agreements