Licensing and Commercialization Overview

If a match is found and a company is interested in your innovation, the licensing team negotiates a term sheet and a license agreement for the rights to the technology.

The license agreement describes the rights and responsibilities related to the use and exploitation of intellectual property developed at Rutgers. The agreement stipulates that the licensee will diligently seek to develop the technology further if necessary and bring the intellectual property to the market for the public good and provide a reasonable return on investment to Rutgers.

Sometimes the better path to commercialization for a technology is through forming a startup around the innovation.

Our New Ventures team works with faculty, researchers and business founders to evaluate the opportunities of using a startup company as a vehicle to bring specific innovations from the lab to the marketplace.

Once a startup is indicated, New Ventures assists with building a startup team to form a company which will work with New Ventures to secure a license to pertinent intellectual property. After a license agreement is reached, the New Ventures team continues to provide support with accessing key resources and business development. 

Once the deal is finalized, the Office for Research manages all aspects of the partnership, including revenue distribution. Direct benefits of commercialization efforts for the inventor or creator include:

• personal income
• research support income
• societal impact.

These vary greatly from technology to technology, but Rutgers will not ask for terms which make it economically unfeasible for your company to market a product.

Rutgers licenses are usually considered fair and equitable by our partnering companies and licensees. Typical licensing terms will include reimbursement of patent costs, license issue and maintenance fees, royalties on product sales and development milestones.

Under limited circumstances, we will also accept equity in lieu of other payments. Rutgers requires due diligence provisions and indemnification for products sold in every license executed. If you have any questions, or would like to obtain a draft license agreement, please contact the Technology Transfer team.

If the innovation is Software or another type of Copyrighted Work, we can provide Express Licensing.

Express Licensing provides an e-commerce-like process that enables immediate use of the Work by selecting the Work to license, choosing a license option, making payment and downloading the work for immediate use.