Intellectual Property Basic Manual for Researchers in Universities

One of the better known missions of university is to teach and create knowledge; however, in today’s world, it also needs to focus on research to generate development for society’s growth. Universities are now making Intellectual Property (IP) and patenting their research, either to generate profit and transfer that technology by licensing it or selling it to the industry to commercialize it or to help the economic development of their region. Specialized offices are created within the university to facilitate the interaction between the university researchers and the industry. Universities in Mexico have started to follow the path of Technology Transfer, but there is still so much to learn to achieve the international levels and to meet the industry needs. Thus some new guidelines and process are introduced to the researchers to identify the potential future of an investigation.

Throughout this chapter different kinds of Intellectual Property will be discussed. Each kind will be defined, the cases in which any of them may apply will be shown, and also some of the steps to follow for the application will be revised. These kinds of intellectual property are: patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets, and each one is different within different countries. Finally the importance of the intellectual property within companies is discussed, as for the impact of this has to their economic development.

One of the very first steps before writing or submitting a patent is searching for any similar patents already registered. This step is crucial because if any similar patent exists, the new patent has to be a specific percentage different to be considered a new invention otherwise it will be rejected and valuable time and money will have been wasted. In this chapter some recommendations are made to help you search for patents already registered either for a specific country or internationally.

As explained in the previous chapters, every country has their own laws regarding industrial property and different guidelines for applying to them. In this chapter the whole process of industrial property will be focused on Mexico, from the steps to write and fill an application format to what happens to a patent when it reaches the expiration date. Finally some policies about intellectual property that the Tecnológico de Monterrey follows are shown.

Some of actual research projects in the Tecnológico de Monterrey that followed an intellectual property process are shown as case studies in this chapter. Each case demonstrate different requirements of protection depending of the final use for the patent, either to commercialize it on its own country of invention or internationally. The projects are: Exoskeleton controlled by brain signals, intelligent control toolkit for LabVIEW, climate control for greenhouse and its control system, intelligent wheelchair, reconfigurable micro machine tool.