Who owns students’ brain power?

Before NASA held the finals of its robotics competition in September at WPI, the school hosted one of the preliminary rounds in 2015.

PHOTO/COURTESY WPI Lola the sea turtle in Key West got a prosthetic flipper thanks to a team of Worcester Polytechnic Institute engineering students.

PHOTO/COURTESY NASA

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By Laura Finaldi

When 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 academic 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 property 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 standpoint 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 determining ballistic impact, charting a person'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 survived the explosion itself, but was left stranded on the ground somewhere, unable to move or call for help?

When it came time to work on a senior capstone project, Tolisano brought the idea to his classmates Richards, Carolyn Keyes and Nick Potvin, and together the students worked to create what they call a body armor impact mapping system.

50 percent vs. 99 percent

After some encouragement from an academic adviser, the students decided to explore getting their project patented. They did a search for similar products on the market and ultimately decided to pay for a provisional patent themselves. They filed it in March and now have until March 2017 to improve their product and get feedback from others in the industry before deciding whether or not to go forward with a full utility patent.

Since they paid the patent fees themselves, the students own 99 percent of the product, and WPI owns 1 percent. Had they asked WPI to pay the fees, ownership would be split 50/50.

Things work a little differently over at Becker College, where the focus is more on software-based digital games rather than hardware products that need to be mechanically engineered, said Monty Sharma, managing director of MassDiGI, the state video game industry center that is part of Becker. The school isn't interested in owning their inventions, Sharma said, only in giving students the resources they need to create cool products.

“We would much rather put their name on a building than ask for a piece of their company,” he said.

Taking turtle steps

Not every WPI project is patent-ready – many are great products that are meant to be built upon by others. In the case of another WPI capstone group, engineering students Iok Wong, Samantha Varela and Vivian Liang focused their efforts on helping Lola, a disabled sea turtle living at Florida's Key West Aquarium.

Lola, a rare female Kemp ridley sea turtle, had to have her right flipper amputated after she was found stranded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2002 with fishing line wrapped around her limb. After being rehabilitated at a rescue center for 11 months, she was released back into the gulf, only to be found stranded again two days later. She lived at several aquariums and rescue centers after that before settling at the Key West Aquarium in 2007.

Her amputated right flipper meant she was only able to swim in circles in the aquarium tank, which led to a lot of discomfort during feeding, according to WPI.

That's where the students came in. Using their various areas of expertise, they developed a hydrodynamic biomimetic prosthetic fin using 3D printing to create a flipper that imitates Lola's healthy left limb. The flipper is biomimetic, meaning it was made to fit her and imitates the movement of her healthy flipper. The turtle adapted to the flipper almost immediately and is now able to swim smoothly.

If there was an attachment material in the flipper that was different from anything else out there – or if it wasn't already in the public domain – it might be patent-eligible, Keiller said.

But it's not. And that's okay. Some products, he said, are meant to be built upon by others.