In addition, OTT and campus offices executed 971 secrecy agreements that enabled companies to receive confidential information necessary to evaluate technologies for commercial potential. At the close of the fiscal year, OTT and the campus offices were overseeing a portfolio of 403 utility and 352 plant licenses. In managing these agreements, the University must collect monies when due and monitor progress to ensure that the licensees exercise due diligence in developing inventions toward commercial application. Each year, some agreements expire or are terminated based on licensees failure to fulfill agreement obligations. In general, the total number of active utility agreements has continued to rise, while the number of plant licenses has remained stable or decreased somewhat from year to year due to the expiration of several plant patents.
Most inventions are the result of sponsored research activities.
Government grants and contracts contain a standard intellectual property clause that enables the University to elect rights to inventions that may result from the research. In contrast, research agreements with industry or nonprofit sponsors do not contain this standard clause. Instead, each party s rights to any new inventions resulting from the research must be agreed to for each award. There were over 3,600 such awards in FY96 and hundreds of them involved complex negotiations related to the intellectual property clause. In general, industry sponsors have a primary interest in obtaining rights to any technologies resulting from the research they sponsor.