Ownership Rights to University Invention: Universities Legal Authority to Exert Ownership Interest or Claim

In the era of technology revolutionisation, universities have taken a huge step forward embarking on research, development, innovation and commercialisation. In order to successfully carry out these missions, a clear ownership of intellectual property generated at the university is crucial to avoid future disputed transactions. Thus, as part of the technology transfer framework at the university, institutional intellectual property policy has been developed as a guideline to ensure smooth and successful management of intellectual property exploitation. The generally practised ownership model of university intellectual property is university ownership compared with inventor ownership. This paper analyses legal authorities which allow a university to exert ownership over intellectual property created within the university, mainly the intellectual property law, contract law employment law and institutional intellectual property policy. Issues on how binding the institutional intellectual property policy of the university is on members are considered to ensure that the university claim over intellectual property is premised on legal perspectives.