Rally pushes new ideas

When it comes to its students and faculty, Portland State is a hotbed of creativity.

The Office of Innovation and Intellectual Property is holding a Research Innovation Rally from now until June 30 to encourage faculty members to share their ideas and research for a chance at winning up to $20,000.

“The rally is a directed program to increase our engagement or increase people’s engagement with us,” said Joseph Janda, the director of the OIIP.

“We’re inviting people to come forward, bring [their ideas and research] to us. We’ll sit down, we’ll look at, we’ll do an evaluation, we’ll talk through it. We’ll see if maybe there is a patent in there somewhere or if license and copyright might help the project.”

Submissions will be evaluated by an external group of judges, who will choose the top three submissions. The winning submission will receive $20,000 in unrestricted research funds. The other two submissions will receive $5,000 in proposal development funds.

Janda said there are two possible kinds of submissions—patents and copyrights—and that there are certain requirements submissions must fulfill to be considered for the rally.

“For the patentable kind we’re looking for submissions that are falling out of research projects that are about ideas or gadgets. If something is patentable, if it’s novel (meaning if it’s never been done before in the world), if it’s useful and if it’s non-obvious,” Janda said. “It can’t have been published yet. That’s sort of an important criteria.”

Submissions falling into the less tangible realm might be considered copyrights.

“For copyrights, it’s a little more wide open in terms of what can be submitted,” Janda said. “What we’re really looking for is written works: research tools, instruments, pieces of software that people feel are interesting enough to want to push out outside of the university.”

The rally is restricted to PSU faculty members, but Janda noted that faculty members with strong research groups who have students involved in their projects are welcome to bring their ideas.

The Research Innovation Rally might be one of the best ways for PSU faculty members to submit their patents and copyrights, as Oregon state law prohibits faculty members from filing on their own. Faculty members must go through the Office of Innovation and Intellectual Property.

“There are situations where we have waived those patents back to them, and we have done so on a number of occasions, but at the very least they have to run through our office anyway,” Janda said.