Under what circumstances will OTM finance filing a patent application?
• The OTM operates as a business and has specific business criteria that each invention must meet before the OTM will invest University funds in filing a patent application. Over its lifetime, a U.S. patent application can cost, on the average, roughly $20,000 and the foreign equivalent can cost, over its lifetime, up to $250,000. Thus deciding to file a patent application worldwide can trigger a substantial investment commitment. • The OTM seeks to recover its investment by licensing the patent rights to competent, committed commercial developers. Failure to secure a licensee causes the OTM to incur a significant financial loss and results in wasting campus funds that could have been better spent on research and education. • The OTM’s objective thus is not to file patent applications for the sake of filing patent applications, not only because of the high cost of patent protection but also because not every patentable invention is licensable. Also, not every invention must be patented
