IPR Systems

Software Component Development:

RAM (Research Artefact manager)   

    "Among companies who have made serious ongoing efforts to mine the value in their IP portfolios, a consensus is emerging that:

    (1) intellectual property may ultimately prove to be the corporation's only sustainable competitive advantage;

    (2) only those organizations with the foresight to place intellectual asset management (IAM) at the heart of their operations will prosper."

    PriceWaterhouseCoopers Intellectual Property News, May 1998

RAM is a Life Cycle IP Asset Management Tool for research organizations.

Modern research projects often involve development teams from multiple organisations collaborating and contributing over many iterations of knowledge accumulation. As a consequence the intellectual property rights in most projects become highly complex. Simplistic approaches to prevent this often don't work, are resisted by participants or are not affordable.

Failing to manage the complexity of research IP can hinder both the creation of new IP and the process of commercialisation of current IP assets.

The Research Artefact Manager (RAM) is designed to decrease the administrative burden of managing the many intellectual property and other contributions and creations throughout the life of a collaborative technical research project.

It will also assist in the commercialisation of research projects by documenting the provenance of all IP, thereby facilitating certainty of title and by helping to identify the IP that has commercial potential.

Research Artefact Manager is a JAVA component based distributed work tool which can be implemented on an intranet, extranet or via the Internet. It can track, manage and help with the commercialisation of the many threads of intellectual property contributions and outputs of scientific and industrial research, including in-kind, financial, module and intellectual contributions.

In order to be useful to a broad range of research organisations and individuals, Research Artefact Manager will track the IP that is developed by, or contributed to, the research from conception, through review, patent lodgement, publishing of research and product development leading to commercialisation.

It will enable researchers and potential investors to review ownership of key components of the research, the permitted uses of any third party inputs and any costing implications these may have, and responsibilities and rights accruing to partners in the research project. It will also incorporate multilevel watermarking technology for protection of the IP, to identify and track interim and confidential reports including versioning, components and outputs.