Team:CCA San Diego/Entrepreneurship

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Entrepreneurship

Provisional Patent

In order for any successful project to be commercialized, their work must be legally protected to protect their invention. Thus, CCA iGEM looked into the steps necessary for our work to be patented. To start the process, we reached out to a local law firm and explained our project. They explained that obtaining a patent can take a significant amount of time - 18 to 24 months - and is extremely expensive. However, they did explain that provisional patents can take much less time and are far cheaper. They allow for your work to be legally protected for around a year whilst you secure funding and draft up a full patent. To file a provisional patent, a number of documents must be completed, as well as the patent application itself. We decided to write up the provisional patent on our own, and go through the paperwork necessary for fruition. This provisional patent is put together for the bioreactor we developed as a part of the practical implementation of our project. As we already know the necessary steps for filing the patent, gene patents could also be filed for our parts. The provisional utility patent we put together can be found below.

Investments

Now that we have the process necessary for securing our intellectual property, we needed to ensure that for the inventions we didn't get around to protecting and filing, our investors would not disclose any of our company secrets. Thus, we drafted a non-disclosure agreement to ensure that those we share our project, and the specifics of our project, will not seize our idea. The NDA we put together is below; the "receiving party" would be whomever we share our idea with.

LLC Operating Agreement

If we were to actually start a company and make our project into a business, an LCC Operating Agreement is most definitely required. It outlines how the business will be organized, how decisions will be made within the company, and what happens if a member were to withdraw from the company. Basically, it is the framework for how our business will be run, if we were to commercialize our idea. We drafted the below NDA with the help of the law firm; however they just changed some of the wording and the bulk of it was done by the team.