The links below present opportunities for entering innovation competitions. The awards range in dollar amounts from modest to generous.
The two-letter Intellectual Property Code (IP Code) reflects a competition's ownership and licensing rules. Generally by submitting, one is agreeing to the rules, the submission therefore is contractual. The letters indicate a Yes (Y) or No (N) response to these questions: Does a submitter give up ownership to their invention upon submission or winning? Does a submitter agree to a royalty-free license to some party such as the sponsor? An IP-Code of N-N answers these questions No and No respectively, whereas N-Y are No and Yes responses.
- InnovateND
A competition to encourage innovation in North Dakota.
Deadline: November 20, 2007 for 1st Round (2007-2008 competition)
Awards: TBD
IP Code: TBD
- Collegiate Inventors Competition
A competition to encourage engineering invention by students.
Deadline: May 15, 2008
Awards: $25,000 (Top prize), $15,000 (Top grad and undergrad), and awards for students' advisors.
IP Code: N-N
- Imagine Cup – "the world's premier student technology competition"
The competition has twelve categories covering various areas of software innovations and development.
Deadline: varies depending upon category, generally from Feb 1 to May 15.
Awards: varies depending upon the category.
IP Code: N-Y.
(Additional info
- Clay Mathematics Institute
This is a competition for math afficionados. The preeminent award is the Millenium Award given to someone who can provide a proof for one of mathematics seven millenium problems.
Deadline: no deadline
Award: $1 million per solved millenium problem.
IP code: N-N.
- BME Idea
BME idea is a national biomedical engineering competition for college students. It offers three awards.
Deadline: April 4, 2008
Award: $10,000, $2,500, and $1,000 (in 2007) for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places.
IP Code: N-N
- Olympus Innovation Award (from NCIIA)
The three award associated with this program are for faculty members and by nomination only. Offered by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA)
Deadline: TBD (est, mid-February)
Award: $10,000, $2,500, and $1,000 (for the three awards)
IP Code: N-N
- Junior Engineer Technical Socity
BME idea is a national biomedical engineering competition for college students. It offers three awards.
Deadline: April 4, 2008
Award: $10,000, $2,500, and $1,000 (in 2007) for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places.
IP Code: TBD
- NISH Competition
BME idea is a national biomedical engineering competition for college students. It offers three awards.
Deadline: April 4, 2008
Award: $10,000, $2,500, and $1,000 (in 2007) for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places.
IP Code: TBD
The following links are the home pages for some of the leading journals for ECE faculty members and graduate students.
Disclaimer: This section on intellectual property is not provided to be advisory and should not be interpreted as such. It is meant to be explicatory only, and only of a general nature. One should consult a lawyer and appropriate literature authored by legal professionals for specifics on how intellectual property laws might apply to your situation.
What is it?
Basically patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Patents provide an inventor or owner of a patent certain usage rights and protections for an invention. Copyrights provide the author or owner of the copyright rights and protections for a written work, such as a book or musical composition. A trademark provides the owner of the trademark the exclusive use of a symbol or phrase representative of their company, their organization, or a product line.
Intellectual property can also be trade secrets or manufacturing processes that are not protected by formal procedure. A disadvantage of patents and copyrights, is that the item must be described and made public. In some cases it is wiser for businesses to keep these things secret. An example is the formula for Coca-Cola.
These are legally defined items, each of which has their own requirements, and application processes. Federal offices manage these items for the United States.
Why is it important in innovation and entrepreneurialism?
In short, intellectual property allows the owner of the intellectual property – the patent, copyright, trademark – the right to manage their intellectual property, market it (license it or sell it), and derive income from it.
Who owns intellectual property?
The United States Constitution states that "The Congress shall have power … To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (Article I, Section 8) By default inventors and authors own their own work, and the copyrights and patents that they obtain for their work.
The default can be overridden however under certain circumstances. In general, those circumstances are the following. There is significant conformity across the states of the United States, but policy specifics can vary from state to state.
- Work for hire. When someone is hired to author or invent, the employer has the ownership right to intellectual property created by their employee – absent a contract specifying other terms. If authoring or inventing is not part of an employee's job, then the employer does not automatically have an ownership right to the employee's authored or invented works.
- Contracts yielding ownership. When the author or inventor confers the ownership of their intellectual property to another party in a written contract, and in some states even by an oral contract, then the author or inventor give up the ownership right of their intellectual property (copyrights and patents) to the other party.
- Contracts retaining ownership. When the author or inventor retain the ownership of their intellectual property in a written contract, say with an employer, then the author or inventor retain their ownership right.
- Bayh-Dole Act. Faculty members of universities and students who accept federal funding and invent something with the federal funding, confer the ownership of the associated intellectual property to the university by virtue of accepting the funding.
- Shop Rights. If an employee is not hired to invent, yet uses an employer's resources – an office, the computers, a laboratory – to invent, then the employer generally has a royalty-free right to use the employee's inventions. This is called a shop right. The employee in this case retains the ownership rights to those inventions, provided that the inventor did not sign away those rights in a contract (such as an employment contract). But the employee no longer will have 'exclusive' use of the invention.
Students, generally, do not give up the ownership right to their intellectual property for merely attending a university.
Most books on patents and copyrights say little about ownership issues, thus are quite inadequate on this count. Of the articles and books that do mention ownership, most are written from the perspective of, or for the benefit of, the employer, not for the benefit of the inventor.
International Considerations
There are no international patent or copyright offices. Therefore, copyrights and patents generally have to be filed in each country where one intends to retain protection from copyright or patent infringement. The United States by far has the largest patent office worldwide, and some governments honor U.S. issued copyrights and patents as if issued from their own government. Most larger countries, however, require a filing in their offices.
How to do Patent Searches
To help determine whether an invention (or idea) has already been patented, one should do a patent search before filing the invention with the U.S. Patent Office.
There are two primary benefits in doing a patent search. One is the benefit already stated – it will help one determine whether his or her idea has already been patented, thus whether it is worth the time and expense to go forward with a patent application.
The other value is that one can learn from prior patents. The knowledge one gains can enable an inventor to change an otherwise unpatentable idea into one that is patentable. The idea here is that if there is more than one way to do something – something inventors have usually thought of during their conceptualization stages – the inventor can choose the method that has not yet been done. It may not be the optimal, in the inventor's opinion, but unlike the optimal, it may still have an opportunity for patenting.
There are several ways to do a patent search. The easiest way is to have a patent lawyer do it for you. However, since about 2003 the United States Patent and Trademark Office has added search capabilities to their site so that inventors can look for themselves. The procedure is the following:
- Go to www.uspto.gov on the Internet
- Click on the "How to Search" link.
- Follow the instructions on the resultant page.
Useful Links – for Intellectual Property