PowerPoint Presentation

Collaborative R&D:
academia, tax, ip & incentives

G-J van Rooyen

Software Engineering Colloquium24 May 2012

The case for R&D partnerships

Short- or medium term access to domain specialists collaborating on your R&Ddf

Incentives for collaborationTHRIP, S11d rebate

Ideal space for development of prototypes or proofs of concept

Grow your own talent pool

The Pitfalls

IP management (Stephan)

Project management

Tech transfer

Nature of deliverables (best effort)

We'll briefly touch on ways
to minimise these risks

Identifying opportunities

Good R&D collaboration opportunities between industry and academia include:

Business need for applied research on non-critical-path technology

Exploratory R&D

Domain expert required

Long-term recruitment

Let's Make a Deal

Deal directly with specialist collaborator

Industry and academia: different drivers

Understand what both parties want from collaboration

Interest is free; focus might not be

More about understanding worlds apart:http://slideshare.net/gvrooyen/joining-worlds-apart

Love in the Time of IPRA

Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act, No. 51 of 2008Don't let it spoil the love

Limits IP rights when state funds were (also) used to create intellectual property

Can be managed (e.g. full cost)

Primary deal risk

Enjoy your THRIP

Technology and Human Resources for Industry ProgrammeDesigned to help industry access expertise at research institutions

Government fully or (usually) partially matches contribution by industry partner

Can it marry with full-cost model?

http://thrip.nrf.ac.za

Pravin Giveth: S11d rebate

Section 11d of the Income Tax Act 58 of 1962 (amended)100% rebate for R&D activities

Can be supersized to 150%

Narrow innovation-driven definition of R&D

Compliance needs to be baked in into collaboration agreement

Successful use unknown

Making it work

Tech transfer tricky to manage

Reports and theses poor vehicles

Tech transfer offices are there to help

Graduate brains transfer tech extremely well

Graduate recruitment tricky to manageCan be extremely valuable screening and recruitment process, if relationships are built over time

Prototyping vs. product dev

Conclusion

Collaboration with a university can add extremely valuable depth to your R&D

Costs can scale from nothing (interest) to moderate (focus) to full (assignment)

Can greatly assist with talent acquisition (substantial issue for software companies)

Do get in touch!

Thank You

G-J van Rooyen

gvrooyen@sun.ac.za@gvrooyen

sun.ac.za/medialab