+ HOME

Intellectual Property Management

The Intellectual Property Management for Stennis Space Center (SSC) is one of the responsibilities of the Innovative Partnerships Program. New technologies that are being developed by NASA, or under a NASA contract, are identified and processed to determine the appropriate actions to be taken to protect and transfer the technology. The Intellectual Property Manager is responsible for protecting the privacy and ownership rights of the innovators of each technology.

Identification
The law requires that any innovation or new technology be reported to NASA. One responsibility of the SSC Intellectual Property Manager is the identification and collection of innovations and new technologies that are developed by Stennis NASA employees, or developed in the course of a contract for NASA Stennis Space Center.

Evaluation
All technologies reported to the Intellectual Property Manager are evaluated to determine the technical merit of the technology and whether there are novel features of the technology that can be patented. In addition, an evaluation is performed to determine the commercial potential and product maturity of the technology. These evaluations are used to determine the appropriate course of action to be taken with the technology.

Legal Protection
Protection of NASA and an innovator's intellectual property is a primary responsibility of the Intellectual Property Manager. NASA owns more than 1,000 patents and patent application, which protect inventions in hundreds of different technology categories. New, useful and unobvious innovations are recommended for patents. Once a patent application has been submitted, NASA can make the rights to these inventions available to industry through the Patent Licensing Program.

If the technology has commercial potential and appears to have unique and novel features, the Intellectual Property Manager may make the decision to pursue legal protection of the technology.

Licensing
Once the legal protection issues have been determined and the necessary actions taken, the Intellectual Property Manager can make the technology available as a licensing opportunity. There are several Licensing Opportunities currently available at SSC.

Publishing
As part of the evaluation process, the Intellectual Property Manager is also responsible for determining how public can be made aware of the technology. Even if legal protection and licensing is not pursued, information about the technology can be made available to the public through publication of a TechBrief article or other types of news releases and publications.

A number of SSC technologies have been published in TechBriefs over the past several years.