In Brief: The Lambert Agreement explained

Article from our Summer 2008 edition of InsideIP.

For anyone that has ever considered entering into, or advising someone entering into, a business-university collaboration which may produce intellectual property (IP), a visit to http://www.innovation.gov.uk/lambertagreements/ is a must. The website provides a number of agreements which provide starting points for allowing the parties to agree on how the IP is to be protected, owned and licensed.

In 2003, a review on Business-University Collaborations was conducted on behalf of the Treasury.  The review was chaired by Richard Lambert, former editor of the Financial Times and currently a member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England.  As a result of the review, it was decided that key stakeholders representing universities and business should work together to produce a small set of model collaborative research agreements for voluntary use by industry and universities. These agreements, known as “Lambert Agreements”, are now available for download, free of charge, at http://www.innovation.gov.uk/lambertagreements/. The agreements set out a range of approaches to the ownership and exploitation of IP including, for example, ownership of IP by the university with exclusive or non-exclusive licensing to the business.

The website offers five model Agreements and Guidance Notes on how to use them. A Decision Guide is provided to help users through some of the issues a university or a business may want to consider when entering a collaboration, with the aim of helping users choose the right Agreement. The issues considered by the Decision Guide are the ownership and right to use the results of the project, the financial and other contributions made by the commercial sponsor, and the use of the results for academic purposes by the university.

Three of the five agreements are suitable for a collaboration in which the university owns the IP.  The first Agreement grants the business a non-exclusive licence to use the results of the collaboration in a specified field and/or territory.  The second Agreement grants the business a license to use the results in a specified field and/or territory and the option to acquire an exclusive licence. The third Agreement grants the business a license to use the results in a specified field and/or territory, as well as an option to take an assignment of the IP in some circumstances. The last two Agreements relate to IP owned by the business but provide provisions for allowing the university to use the results of the collaboration for academic purposes while still protecting the confidentiality of the results.

In addition to the five agreements, the website also provides copies of complementary agreements such as Patent and Know-how Licence Agreements, a Patent Assignment and a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Olivia Johansson 01 Jun 2008

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