Faculty and Staff Research Agreements with Industry Save Time, Forge Relationships
By Robin Herron
Recently signed research umbrella agreements with Raytheon Company and Lockheed
Martin Undersea Systems speed the negotiating process and promote mutually beneficial
relationships, say staff and faculty involved.
The umbrella agreements, under which companies fund George Mason faculty research,
specify that the university retains the right to publish and ownership of the
intellectual property. In return, the sponsors have the first opportunity to benefit
from inventions that may develop from the research.
“The umbrella agreement works out the difficult issues such as title to
intellectual property and publication rights,” says Jennifer Murphy, director
of the Office of Technology Transfer. “It establishes the framework for all
the business issues and saves us from having to go in and renegotiate those issues
for every project.”
The Lockheed Martin agreement, which was one and one-half years in the making,
also involved Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth
University, Old Dominion University, and the College of William and Mary. The
initiative was significant in defusing industry’s perception that universities
are all different and difficult to work with, says Christopher Hill, vice provost
for research. “There’s enormous political value to it,” he says.
The agreements were fueled by the parties’ desire to streamline the system
for getting research under way. In the past, some projects were dropped because
the process took too long, says Andre Manitius, chairman of the Electrical and
Computer Engineering (ECE) Department in the School of Information Technology
and Engineering. Manitius’s department houses several of the research projects
under the new agreements and pushed strongly to get them finalized.
Of course the major impetus for industry in consummating these agreements is
its interest in engaging the faculty. “The Lockheed Martin project was funded
because Lockheed Martin was interested in research done by Kathleen Wage [an ECE
assistant professor] on the modeling of acoustic undersea channels,” Manitius
says. “Without the interest of Lockheed Martin in this project, the agreement
might still be in negotiation.”
ECE faculty projects with Raytheon funded under the new agreement to date include
a two-part project headed by Bernd-Peter Paris on secure military communication
systems that can be used on battlefields. In addition, Alexander Levis initiated
a transitional project involving consultation on a tool developed to model courses
of action and their effects for the U.S. Navy (the project has since been assumed
by Lee Wagenhals, research faculty member in the Center for Excellence in Command,
Control, Communications, and Intelligence, because Levis is on leave). Another
Raytheon-funded project is being conducted by Liping Di in the Center for Earth
Observing and Space Research in the School of Computational Sciences.
The major benefits for the companies, Murphy says, are the opportunity to get
the first option on licensing intellectual property and access to “the creative
intellectual capital of the university.”
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