human: What are possible outcomes of an evaluation of inventions?
assistant: The Technology Transfer Office reports the evaluation outcome to the Management Board, which will then take the final decision. The evaluation outcome is not a statement about the quality of research, but merely about its marketability.Typically, there are four possible outcomes:1. Claim of the employee invention: Should the Management Board decide in favor of claiming the invention, the patent application process will be initiated. This means that Technology Transfer believes it can recoup the investment into patenting. However, later events or a lack of commercial interest can lead to the termination of a patenting procedure at a later date.2. Release of an invention to the inventors: If the Office of Technology Transfer believes that it will not be able to find a licensee and thus to recoup the patenting costs, the invention is released to the inventors. In this case the inventors are free to file a patent application at their own expense and to exploit the invention. The DKFZ will not receive a share in potential revenues.3. Holding back and waiting for further research data: Sometimes it is wise to disclose an invention at the time of "conception". However, a patent application will usually not be filed before the invention has actually been reduced to practice. This helps to avoid expenses for ideas that will not work. Moreover, it is often not possible to predict what critical details will facilitate actual reduction of an invention to practice and should therefore be included in a patent application to obtain good patent protection.4. Testing the market: If it is hard to predict commercial interest in an invention, a sensible step to take before patenting can be to approach, together with the inventors, companies which might be interested in the invention. The companies would be committed to secrecy. If no interest is shown, the invention will be released.