(UK) Universities' IP And Spinout Policies

Yesterday, I virtually attended a half-day conference organised by the UCL Institute of Brand and Innovation Law (IBIL), looking at IP and spin-out policies of universities and how this is evolving. 

The conference was enlightening and informative, and I will highlight a few points I found of particular interest. As someone who advises many UK universities on securing IP, I was not at all surprised to hear that, while one would expect the ultimate goal to be similar across the universities, there is still a significant degree of divergence in terms of how this may be delivered. This was nicely illustrated by looking at the total number of terms universities use to define IP, as well as the length of their published IP policies. With respect to the number of terms defining IP, this varied from zero to 22 and the length of university IP polices varied from 3 pages to 71 pages. Although the data was anonymized, it would be interesting to analyse which universities fell