Research and Development Agreements

If you are planning to join forces with another organisation to develop a product, you need to have a robustly drafted research and development agreement in place dealing with issues such as:

The scope of the project;

• Who will do what;
• Payment terms;
• If any intellectual property of one or both parties is to be invested in the joint venture, how it is to be dealt with;
• Which party will own the intellectual property rights arising out of the joint creative effort; and whether the non-owning party shall be entitled to a non-exclusive licence to use the developed intellectual property;
• Confidentiality;
• The standard of research and development to be performed;
• Project management – frequencies of meetings and reports.