Mission & Vision
We Want to Hear From You!
Rice OTT encourages all faculty, staff, and student researchers to begin the conversation with our office about innovations or discoveries that arise from your work here. We have a dedicated team of intellectual property and licensing professionals with scientific expertise who are focused on managing your technology, and we are excited to work with you. We share the goal of finding ways to put Rice technologies to work for the public good.
There are many reasons you may want to start the conversation with our office:
- You believe your research can contribute to a product or service that would benefit the public.
- You want to create a startup company to develop a technology and want to understand how to work with Rice to help the company and technology succeed.
- You may want to develop a relationship with an existing company, whether to license the technology you have developed, to bring funding to your lab, or to network and build relationships for you and your students.
- A research sponsor may require you to disclose new technologies developed under a particular award. Rice’s patent and software policy also encourages and requires you to disclose patentable inventions you create using Rice resources.
- Finally, if a technology is licensed, you and the other inventors will receive a share of any license income Rice receives according to the terms of Rice’s patent policy.
Functions & Timing
Our recommendations on whether to seek IP protection for a new invention are based on the likelihood of successfully commercializing the technology as well as the prior art landscape in the relevant field. In addition to traditional licensing pathways, we also take into consideration the possibility of attracting industry-sponsored research funding, as well as the desire and ability of the inventors to form a new startup company around the technology. Submitting a disclosure starts our review process, but does not itself protect any intellectual property, and does not guarantee that Rice will decide to file a patent application.
We aim to provide inventors at least a preliminary technology evaluation report and recommendation on whether or not to seek IP protection within 30 days of receiving an invention disclosure. The overall process of discussion with the inventors, revising our report to take into account new information, and coming to a consensus on the next steps may take longer, however, depending on the technology and the conversations we wind up having.
Please be aware that it is difficult or impossible for us to review technology disclosures that are missing substantial information such as supporting data or details about the inventors or funding sources. We will reach out to inventors to try to get missing information, but in these cases, our review and recommendation process will be delayed until we have a complete disclosure.
For additional information on the kind of detail we ask inventors to provide and the importance of each piece of information we request, please see our disclosure FAQs page. If you have any questions not covered by the FAQs, please email us
Next Steps
If our evaluation of a disclosure leads to a recommendation to pursue IP protections on your technology, our office and the inventors will agree in writing on a strategy and timeline for pursuing IP protections that are informed by the commercial prospects for the technology. For example, we may set out a list of existing companies we intend to contact within one year of a provisional filing to see if they would be interested in licensing your technology, and agree to revisit our IP filing strategy based on feedback we receive from our marketing efforts. If the inventors intend to pursue a new startup company, we may instead agree to check back in on the process of company formation and fundraising and discuss licensing the technology to the new company when certain milestones are achieved.
Once we have an agreed-upon commercialization plan, we will then work with you and a patent attorney to get a patent application drafted and filed. Click here to see how the IP filing and patent prosecution process works.
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Mission & Vision
We Want to Hear From You!
Rice OTT encourages all faculty, staff, and student researchers to begin the conversation with our office about innovations or discoveries that arise from your work here. We have a dedicated team of intellectual property and licensing professionals with scientific expertise who are focused on managing your technology, and we are excited to work with you. We share the goal of finding ways to put Rice technologies to work for the public good.
There are many reasons you may want to start the conversation with our office:
- You believe your research can contribute to a product or service that would benefit the public.
- You want to create a startup company to develop a technology and want to understand how to work with Rice to help the company and technology succeed.
- You may want to develop a relationship with an existing company, whether to license the technology you have developed, to bring funding to your lab, or to network and build relationships for you and your students.
- A research sponsor may require you to disclose new technologies developed under a particular award. Rice’s patent and software policy also encourages and requires you to disclose patentable inventions you create using Rice resources.
- Finally, if a technology is licensed, you and the other inventors will receive a share of any license income Rice receives according to the terms of Rice’s patent policy.
Functions & Timing
Our recommendations on whether to seek IP protection for a new invention are based on the likelihood of successfully commercializing the technology as well as the prior art landscape in the relevant field. In addition to traditional licensing pathways, we also take into consideration the possibility of attracting industry-sponsored research funding, as well as the desire and ability of the inventors to form a new startup company around the technology. Submitting a disclosure starts our review process, but does not itself protect any intellectual property, and does not guarantee that Rice will decide to file a patent application.
We aim to provide inventors at least a preliminary technology evaluation report and recommendation on whether or not to seek IP protection within 30 days of receiving an invention disclosure. The overall process of discussion with the inventors, revising our report to take into account new information, and coming to a consensus on the next steps may take longer, however, depending on the technology and the conversations we wind up having.
Please be aware that it is difficult or impossible for us to review technology disclosures that are missing substantial information such as supporting data or details about the inventors or funding sources. We will reach out to inventors to try to get missing information, but in these cases, our review and recommendation process will be delayed until we have a complete disclosure.
For additional information on the kind of detail we ask inventors to provide and the importance of each piece of information we request, please see our disclosure FAQs page. If you have any questions not covered by the FAQs, please email us
Next Steps
If our evaluation of a disclosure leads to a recommendation to pursue IP protections on your technology, our office and the inventors will agree in writing on a strategy and timeline for pursuing IP protections that are informed by the commercial prospects for the technology. For example, we may set out a list of existing companies we intend to contact within one year of a provisional filing to see if they would be interested in licensing your technology, and agree to revisit our IP filing strategy based on feedback we receive from our marketing efforts. If the inventors intend to pursue a new startup company, we may instead agree to check back in on the process of company formation and fundraising and discuss licensing the technology to the new company when certain milestones are achieved.
Once we have an agreed-upon commercialization plan, we will then work with you and a patent attorney to get a patent application drafted and filed. Click here to see how the IP filing and patent prosecution process works.