| Besides talking to a relevant lawyer and finishing your PhD... 1) Talk to other people who have gone through the adventure and get some idea of how it went for them. Both before they finished the PhD and after they started their business. Currently you have little idea of how that works and you are not the first person to go through this course. 2) If your objective is to start a business, then licensing fees and royalties are only a small part of the adventure, costs and profits. And the tech transfer office absolutely has incentives to negotiate: their job, nominally, is to get stuff out there. You just don't know yet how these offices negotiate - what the usual terms are. What it might end up looking like, is - by contrast to the entire business - a smallish licensing fee and smallish royalties (ongoing payments per device), of which 40% (perhaps) would go back to you personally. As opposed to going to your business which will be a different legal entity and ownership entirely. Your income stream personally and your business' income stream are very different things. Depending on how things go, your share of ownership of the business can be quite small (as opposed of ownership of the invention). Lower than 40% most often, and still be an extremely valuable piece of the pie. And the two things are separate assets for you: interest in the invention and interest in the business. 3) By the time the business has an actual product, it's pretty likely there will be several patentable inventions in the business. The one pre-PhD, the university one, being just one of several, the rest owned outright by the business or others. Which probably matters in the discussion of licensing terms and royalties. |