Strengthening cooperation and establishing new partnerships with business and knowledge users in the local, national and international environment raises the University’s profile, increases its competitiveness and improves its economic position.
Collaboration on the basis of a research contract, where the university or one or more of its members agrees with a company to carry out research according to a challenge set by the company and pays for this service.
Collaboration on the basis of a service or consultancy contract, where the University or one or more of its members agrees with the undertaking to provide, for an appropriate fee, the consultancy or services required by the undertaking, which are related to the use of research equipment, specific knowledge or expertise.
Contractual research collaboration is a type of collaboration where partners agree to work together to carry out research. This implies pooling the partners’ prior knowledge, the staff that will be involved as well as financial resources. It is important that the contract clearly defines the prior knowledge and other inputs (e.g. staff, financial resources, in-kind inputs) that each partner contributes to the project.
National and European projects co-funded by various programmes also offer opportunities for cooperation between the academic and business sectors. The University of Primorska is strongly involved in the European Research Area through a number of international R&D projects, which can provide opportunities for cooperation with companies and joint development cooperation supported by European funding.
Participation in such projects requires a prior agreement on the intellectual property rights arising from the projects, where partners must specify at the application stage that they intend to protect and ensure the use of the results after the end of the project.
The Knowledge Development and Transfer Centre can help you to search for suitable project application opportunities, find project partners and arrange IPR.
The University of Primorska offers knowledge that can be used by companies or industrial partners through licensing or IPR transfer agreements. These agreements usually specify whether the rights to use the knowledge or intellectual property rights are exclusive or non-exclusive, limit them in time and geography, and may also limit them to specific fields of use.
In university-business collaboration, we often encounter data and information that is not protected but may represent a competitive advantage and is therefore confidential. To avoid the dissemination or exploitation of such information, we use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), which allow us to share our unprotected knowledge/ideas with others in order to assess the interest in joint collaboration. With this type of agreement, we protect our data (knowledge or idea) and at the same time prohibit the other party from exploiting it without our permission or disclosing it to unauthorised persons. It is advisable to sign a confidentiality agreement each time before entrusting a third party with information, the disclosure of which could cause economic damage to the University of Primorska and its members or its business partners, or which could jeopardise the subsequent protection of intellectual property rights. Importantly, this agreement does not grant any intellectual property rights attached to the information disclosed.
Collaborative relationships between faculties and industrial partners sometimes also involve students, who are brought in by university researchers to gain additional skills or to produce theses. When students are involved in such collaborations, they also have certain rights and obligations, as such collaborations can lead to results that are commercially useful for the industrial partner involved. Therefore, it makes sense to conclude a tripartite agreement between the University of Primorska, the industrial partner and the student before any such cooperation.
