An Intellectual Property Policy for Macro Research Projects in Iran: A Case Study of the National Macro Research Projects of the Supreme Council for Science, Research and Technology

The prevalence of participation in large-scale research projects among different actors from the industry, governments, and academia makes the occurrence of challenges more likely in the field of intellectual property. This could be mainly attributed to the diversity of different participants, each with different interests and motivations. Therefore, in such projects it becomes crucial to develop an intellectual property policy. In Iran, the national macro research projects of the Supreme Council of Science, Research and Technology are an example of such partnerships, and in this paper, there has been an attempt to recommend a special policy for them. In this regard, the opinions of three groups of intellectual property experts and collaborators in macro research projects were obtained. The opinions are regarding the different states of the main intellectual property issues, in the three stages of (i) prior to, (ii) during and (iii) after the termination of the partnership. The statistical index of the cluster mode of the questions were first calculated. Then by obtaining the acceptable agreement coefficient, the appropriate content of the intellectual property policy in each of these three stages was proposed for national grand projects. Among the proposed recommendations was the necessity of determination of issues such as: previous intellectual assets, intellectual assets expected from the project, ownership and payment of related expenses and their confidentiality considerations at the time of the submission of proposals by the participating parties in the projects.