Worcester Business Journal

8 Worcester Business Journal | October 24, 2016 | wbjournal.com From bulletproof vests to video games to turtle prosthetics, Central Mass schools take varied approaches over the intellectual property of student projects Who owns students' W hen Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard University, it was the beginning of an era that no one could have predicted. But what if Zuckerberg used significant university resources to make Facebook, to the point where Harvard would have asserted ownership? Or what if an aca- demic adviser guided him through the process? It's possible the Facebook we know today would not exist. As colleges increasingly push their students to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, through entrepreneurship programs and on-campus incubators, it's become a balancing act when it comes to figuring out who owns what. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, for example, students and faculty who use significant university resources to make a product have options when it comes to ownership or licensing of their inventions. While college intellectual property policies vary, several factors – like whether or not university resources were used, or if outside grant funding was involved – play into the bottom line of who owns what, said Roger Zimmerman, a partner at Worcester law firm Bowditch & Dewey. "It's going to be a balancing between what the source of the funds are, what rules go with the funds and the college's specific intellectual property policy," Zimmerman said. At WPI, students are increasingly viewing their senior capstone projects as more than just something to get a good grade on, said Todd Keiller, the university's director of intellectual prop- erty and innovation. According to the patent office's annual report, WPI filed 63 patents in 2015, a 103-percent increase over 2012, when 31 patents were filed. "The level of activity has really increased dramatically," Keiller said. "The number of student teams that have an increasing awareness of IP and are thinking of it from a commercial stand- point has gone way up." Inspired by a grenade One example of this came last year, when a group of seniors filed a patent for a bulletproof vest they created with an electronic system capable of deter- mining ballistic impact, charting a per- son's location and calculating the likely injury, based on force. Chris Tolisano, who graduated in May, got the idea for what his group calls a body armor impact mapping system during his freshman year, while watching the movie "Act of Valor." The way his classmate, Zach Richards, tells it, Tolisano was struck by a scene in the movie where a Navy Seal, in an attempt to save the rest of his squad, jumps in front of a grenade and is killed on impact. It got him thinking – what happens after he gets hit? How would his base command know what happened to him, or where he fell? And what if he BRAIN POWER? BY LAURA FINALDI Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer Lola the sea turtle in Key West got a prosthetic flipper thanks to a team of Worcester Polytechnic Institute engineering students. P H O T O / C O U R T E S Y N A S A Worcester Polytechnic Institute hosted the finals of NASA's Sample Return Robot competition in September, where teams from around the nation competed for a $1.4-million prize. The seven finalists teams were a combination of those that developed their technology at universities and those that did it at private labs. P H O T O / C O U R T E S Y W P I

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