Thursday, February 9, 2012

About IP in the Innovate 4 Healthcare Challenge

During the Innovate 4 Healthcare Challenge informational webinar, several questions were asked regarding the intellectual property (IP) surrounding contest submissions.  IP refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.1   The Challenge is designed to incentivize and stimulate ideas (IP) for strengthening patient and healthcare provider engagement by developing a solution that merges process innovation, technology enablers and a compelling market strategy.  The Challenge organizers carefully considered the issues regarding intellectual property or “IP” while planning the Challenge.  The organizers want all entrants to clearly understand these rules.   The rules pertaining to IP include clauses S. Non-return and R. Right of Refusal from the Guidelines, copied below:

S. Non-return
By participating in the Challenge, Teams grant to the organizers a royalty-free, non-exclusive and irrevocable license to copy, reproduce, display or distribute the technology and data from the Challenge, and to make derivative works based upon the entry or a substantial portion of the entry without attribution or prior permission. Entries become property of the organizers and will not be acknowledged or returned.

T. Right of Refusal
JJSI shall be granted the option of first-right to develop and commercialize any technology, information or data generated from the Challenge, including all of the materials from the contest entries (the “Option”). JJSI will have the right to access the information in the contest entries to determine if it or any of its affiliates wants to develop and commercialize the technology or information. JJSI will receive and retain rights to use and secure intellectual property protection for the technology or information obtained from the Innovation Challenge.

What this means plainly is that the organizers will have the option to develop the concept further.  If the organizers do not choose to further develop the concept in a twelve months timeframe, student teams may advance the solution independently.   The organizers expect that the student team would be engaged to collaborate further on select submissions, but there is no guarantee of this.

We look forward to compelling ideas to improve healthcare.  If you have further questions on the IP issue or any other issue, please email us at contact@innovate4healthcare.com.

Good luck!
Challenge Organizers

1.      1. WIPO (2012) Definition of IP. Accessed at http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/

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