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Differentiating undergraduates from graduate student and faculty inventors

Undergraduate students are increasingly engaged in developing products and technologies that are commercially viable outside of the university through their involvement in courses and experiential programs focused on entrepreneurship and product design. It is hypothesized that this trend is increasing activity between undergraduates and university technology transfer offices, leading to questions of how best to align student interests with institutional policies and practices related to intellectual property (IP). Since most undergraduate students are not employed by their universities as are faculty and many graduate students, this raises interesting questions related to the ownership of intellectual property developed as part of a course or experiential program. This paper summarizes the preliminary results of a survey designed to examine the level and nature of undergraduate involvement in creating intellectual property as well as institutional policies and practices in response to these trends. The survey was administered to intellectual property professionals in technology transfer offices at universities in the United States with strong emphases in engineering, science, and technology and/or entrepreneurship.