Engineering Design Teams – Dos and Don’ts
IMPORTANT - Sponsorship Agreements
Some sponsors may request that your team sign a sponsorship agreement that they have drafted before they will give you the sponsorship cheque. Whatever you do, DO NOT sign any agreements. Students do not have the authority to sign an agreement on behalf of UBC. In fact, only a handful of people in the entire university have this authority. If you are asked to sign an agreement, please indicate that you do not have the authority to sign it, and that you will have to provide it to UBC`s legal counsel for review. Then, contact the APSC Development Coordinator (team.sponsorship@apsc.ubc.ca) immediately and she will liaise with legal counsel.
You may want to consider asking the sponsor if the agreement is really necessary. It can sometimes take months for legal counsel to approve and sign an agreement.
Students on UBC Student Design Teams are considered volunteers for the university - Students teams members represent the university through the team and making use of UBC resources to do so. Student team members are not employees and they are not doing this for official academic credit, so the relationship is a bit different than if they were co-op students or doing the project as part of academic capstone project work.
Non-Disclosure Agreements:
- Student Design teams cannot sign any NDAs and UBC legal will not sign NDAs on behalf of design teams - Any UBC-affiliated person (employees and volunteers) are not able to sign any legal documents on their own (they would be individually liable if something comes up), so that is centralized by UBC for any review and signing. UBC legal will not review and sign NDAs on behalf of student design teams, either.
- There are Non-Disclosure templates which exist for this interaction for students working on projects for engineering capstone project courses, but those are specific only to academic courses and UBC legal / UILO will not sign them and take on the liability for them for a student design team.
- Any work that is done in collaboration must be able to move forward without an NDA - This avoids putting students into any conflicts about what information should or should not be shared when working on a project. This allows for your team to work with an external group without having to issue of legal restrictions on the interaction, or for the potential to get into any problems when overseeing multiple team members working on a project.
Intellectual Property and Physical Prototypes:
- Any output that a company might be interested in which is completed by a design team might fall into these two categories:
- Physical prototypes, equipment, etc – any physical items that were purchased or donated to the team are property of UBC, and as such needs to stay as part of UBC and cannot be transferred to an external company. This is true for items purchased using team funds, as well as any team-fabricated items since those were made using UBC resources.
- Intellectual property (designs, methods created by the group, things that can be patented in the future) – this is owned by the students on the student team, and not part of UBC. This is consistent with the general policy on who owns what, as described in UBC Policy LR11 (general writeup, and specific policy).
- IP protection and development is the responsibility of the students involved - Any IP created by the student team which has value needs to be looked after by the members of the student team themselves, there are no resources offered by UBC to help protect the students and their own IP (this may seem strange, but this is the trade-off, that undergraduate students will own anything that is created while they are students, in courses or as volunteers, even when using UBC resources, but that the university will not be able to devote resources to help them protect or develop them, that becomes the responsibility for the students themselves).
- There are Intellectual Property templates which exist for this interaction for students working on projects for engineering capstone project courses, but those are likely different than what you might be interested in doing, since those templates are all written up to transfer any IP developed during the project course to the project sponsor, with no ownership by the students (this is similar to what a student would do for an employment agreement). The reason why this is in place for capstone engineering projects is because this removes one major barrier preventing companies from participating as sponsors, and because the value in that interaction is the technical and project experience gained by the students, and if there happens to be any IP generated by the students on the project (which historically occurs very, very rarely), then it should benefit the company.
- IP protection can be a difficult, expensive and long process (producing your own patents, and then having the resources available to enforce and protect them), and the likelihood of developing valuable IP as a result of your team's investigations is always going to be quite low, but if you are interested in doing so the resources and info for doing it are what start-up companies would pursue to protect their own IP. There are resources through entrepreneurship@UBC, and other startup environments to learn from about this area.
- In general, the best guidance for your team and team members is to think of the student design teams as a tremendous way to develop engineering skills and design/management skills, and in all likelihood far likely outweighs the benefits from pursuing IP-related protections for the work done by the team.