CloseQuick guide for supervisors
2 MINUTE READ
It’s your role as a supervisor to make sure your students understand their intellectual property (IP) rights and responsibilities.
Understand student IP
Understand student IP
Your students create intellectual property (IP) at the University in a variety of ways. They can be the sole contributor or creator of IP. As a supervisor you are also often a creator.
The University owns the rights to all intellectual property created by students working on projects covered by an agreement with an external organisation. These are called 'specified agreements'.
A ‘specified agreement’ is an agreement between the University and an external organisation like a grant funding body, or a public or private sector organisation funding contract research at the University.
This type of agreement controls the ownership or use of any IP that comes from an activity, for example a research project. Examples include research contracts, studentship agreements, and funding agreements.
Talk to your students about IP
Talk to your students about IP
If you’re a research supervisor you must tell prospective and current students about any agreements that apply to their research.
You must discuss how IP and commercialisation will be managed, and make sure your students agree to the terms and responsibilities of their involvement.
Things you should talk about include:
- What background IP is needed and available for the project?
- Does the project need to use IP owned by others?
- How will the project handle culturally or commercially sensitive IP?
- What will be done to protect IP being developed during the project?
- What are the obligations to disclose inventions?
- How will people's input on a project be acknowledged?
Your obligations
Your obligations
All University researchers, including supervisors, must disclose all new intellectual property to the University.
You need to do this whenever you have discovered or created something unique that could:
- have commercial value
- solve a significant problem
- be made into a product or service by an industry partner.
Tell us about your IP before you:
- publish
- present it at a conference
- send out a press release
- talk to anyone outside the University.
If you don’t, this can mean you can’t take your idea to market later.
The best time to disclose is early, at the draft manuscript stage. Ideally this is months before communicating your IP to anyone outside the University, especially prospective investors.
Want to learn more?
Get more information about IP and how it affects you and your students.
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General questions
If you have a general question or don’t know who to talk to, get in touch with us and we’ll point you in the right direction.
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Our local Business Development team members and central IP and Tech Transfer services team are here to help.
Business Development team
IP & Tech Transfer Services team