Your departments are producing protectable work. Most of it never gets protected.

The structure — charter, roles, policy and disclosure process — can be in place within a few weeks. The cell becoming productive takes longer, because that depends on faculty and students actually bringing work to it, and that is a behaviour change rather than a document. In practice the first filings tend to follow the first round of training, once people can recognise a disclosure when they are sitting on one.

Yes, and that is usually the better starting point. We review what exists — the policy, the disclosure route, what has actually been filed and what has lapsed — and fix the parts that are not working rather than replacing a structure your institution has already agreed to. Very often the missing piece is not the cell but a route from disclosure form to a drafted specification.

It depends on your institution’s IP policy, on whether the work was funded or sponsored, and on the terms the student and guide agreed to — which in many institutions is nothing in writing at all. That silence is the problem: ownership becomes contested exactly when the work turns out to be worth something. Writing a policy that answers the question in advance is one of the first things we do.

No. Most institutions have more protectable work than they realise, sitting in completed projects, prototypes and theses that were assessed academically and never assessed for protectability. An invention-identification sweep across existing output is a normal first step, and it frequently produces the cell’s first filings before any new research is done.

It is scoped rather than packaged, because the work varies enormously with institution size, what already exists and how many filings you want in the first year — the factors listed above. We quote in writing against an agreed scope, with official government fees shown separately from professional fees. Tell us about your institution and we will put a proposal together.