Intellectual property in publicly funded cooperative R&D projects

Intellectual property related issues play an important role in the field of research and innovation. Especially in the case of research and projects carried out with the participation of research institutes, universities and other various parties from government and industry, it is necessary to have some special measures and methods for identifying, managing and assigning ownership of results and created innovations; In such a way that interests of all parties be served and also the highest efficiency be achieved. In this study, we attempted to investigate intellectual property issues related to publicly funded cooperative research and development projects. For this purpose, a comparative study has been conducted between two cases of ongoing worldwide programs; the EU’s Horizon 2020 program and the Australian Cooperative Research Centers program. These two programs have been selected for this study due to their long history and continuous improvement in the settings related to intellectual property and assets. All documents in these programs which are related to intellectual property have been reviewed. Based on the comparative study, the main phases, steps and issues related to intellectual property and assets in such projects have been extracted, which include three phase; before the start, implementation and end of the partnership. These phases consist of five, three, and three steps, respectively, in which the main and important issues related to intellectual property and assets are identified. These identified issues at each step can be a practical guide for managing intellectual property in collaborative R&D projects funded by public resources and budgets; In this way, all aspects related to intellectual property as well as the interests and goals of all parties are considered and adequately secured.