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Confidentiality and Intellectual Property
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Shocker Lecture

Overview

Students: Read this syllabus to understand how the course works from the student perspective. Also read the other documents on the course web page (www.npdbd.umn.edu). For example, the "Information for Project Sponsors" document will help you understand how the course is viewed by the companies, and the links to deliverables on the schedule gives an indication of what each team is responsible for.

This is a 2-semester course and you cannot enroll for one semester only.

Staff

Lectures and Team Meetings

The course meets every Monday and Wednesday morning. The class meets as a whole on Mondays for lectures covering the basics of product development. Wednesdays are for team meetings that include students, faculty coaches and company reps. The student team will meet one additional time per week. The schedule of whole class activities is posted on the course schedule.

Attendance at all class lectures and all team meetings is required and expected. Laptops and other electronic devices may be used in lectures for note-taking, but not for email or general web-surfing. Please treat class and team meetings as professional business events.

Projects and Project Teams

Students and faculty are assigned to product development teams based on preference and an attempt to balance the teams for equal business and engineering representation. Student team leaders (see team leader document on the web site) are selected at or near the first team meeting.

Deliverables

The primary deliverables for the course are a working product prototype and a business plan. Other intermediate deliverables and project presentations are required. For specifics see the course schedule. With a very few exceptions, all deliverables are done as a team. Some deliverables represent major tasks, other are minor. It is up to the team to scope out all deliverables at the start of the course and to have a good management process in place to make sure all deliverables are complete by the due date. All deliverables are relevant to your product development efforts and should help the team make decisions as the project proceed. It is also expected that edited deliverables would be used as content for the mid-projects and final project reports.

Unless otherwise stated in the deliverables description, "completion" constitutes posting an electronic version of the deliverable on the team web site by 8:00 AM on the due date, and delivering one hard copy of the deliverable to the faculty reader at the start of class on the due date and delivering one email copy to your primary company contact.

The deliverables will be evaluated by the company, by the faculty coach and by a course faculty reader who will provide feedback to all teams.

Intellectual Property and Confidentiality Policy

It is unusual for university students to sign confidentiality and intellectual property agreements, but then New Product Design and Business Development is an unusual course. The specific agreement you will be asked to sign may vary from project to project but we can tell you what you are likely to see and the implications of the agreements. As part of a university which is committed to the free and open exchange of ideas and to the nurturing of creativity, we would prefer to distance ourselves from any agreement which limits what we can do and how we do it. Because we insist on real projects, however, the reality is that signing agreements is inevitable.

We ask that you consider the material presented here quite carefully and to determine whether you would be comfortable signing confidentiality and intellectual property agreements as part of the course. You will be putting your name on legal documents that must be taken seriously. Courts of law have little enthusiasm for the "I didn't realize" excuse when contracts are broken. If for whatever reason you do not think you will be able to sign the agreements then we ask that you do not take this course. We would be happy to suggest other design, marketing and entrepreneurship courses at the university that do not require such agreements.

Please read the full Confidentiality and Intellectual Property agreement located on the web site to see what you will be signing. You will sign multiple agreements, one for each company sponsoring a project this year. All members of the class, including students working on projects sponsored by other companies and the faculty coaches will sign the same agreement.

Confidentiality
The confidentiality part of the agreement between yourself and the sponsoring company obligates you to prevent disclosure of confidential information that is revealed to you by the company. Confidential information may take the form of product concepts in existence at the company, market survey information or design drawings and reports. All such information will be clearly marked as "Confidential" and every effort will be made to limit the transfer of information to only what is required for you to be successful on your project.

Some of the implications of the confidentiality clauses of the agreement are:

1. You cannot disclose confidential information to your friends, your family (including spouses), or faculty not involved in the course. In short, you are prevented from revealing the information to anyone who has not signed the same agreement that you did.
2. The agreement is between you and the company, not between the university and the company. Further, the University of Minnesota's legal office will not be able to represent you in cases of litigation.
3. The agreement has a five year time limit.
4. You must maintain information confidential up until the time limit even after the course is over and even after you graduate from the university and work in industry (possibly for a competitor). This also means that you will not be able to discuss details of your project work with potential employers during job interviews. You will, however, be able to give prospective employers an adequate description of the activities you did and the skills you learned so long as nothing you discuss contains confidential information.
5. Any publication resulting from the project will be screened by the company to ensure that it contains no confidential information.

Because you will be a member of a large design team, it is likely that patentable ideas will result from the contributions of more than one team member. The Patent Office has a fairly strict definition of who appears as the named inventors on a patent. It is those named inventors who will be assigning the patent over to the company.

Some of the implications of the intellectual property clauses of the agreement are:

1. You can be a named inventor on a patent even if patent ownership is assigned to the company.
2. Because rights are assigned to company, you will not be able to make, use or sell any product you invent. Only the company can do so.
3. The company will pay all costs and fees associated with patent filing. These commonly run in the thousands of dollars.
4. It is quite likely that ideas, concepts or methodologies will be developed by the design team (and documented in the final report) that have potential for significant increase of sales or cost savings by the sponsoring company. However, many of these ideas may not rise to the level of being patentable. The company would then be free to pursue the ideas without returning any monetary rewards to whoever thought them up. We would hope that in this case, the knowledge that your ideas had an impact would be a satisfactory reward. The bottom line here is not to get your hopes up that you will finish the course with lots of patents and royalty returns.

Textbooks and Readings

There is one required textbook:

There are required reading assignments to help you with your project deliverables, but students are expected to be familiar with the contents of the entire textbook as 100% of the textbook will be useful to the project.

Project Notebook You must have a project notebook. Something with a sturdy binding that will hold up over 9 months (e.g. a bound or double spiral notebook). Blank sheets or lightly ruled squares are prefered because they are better for sketching ideas. The recommended notebook is the "University of Minnesota Lab Book", No. 2077S at the bookstore for about $4. Treat this notebook like a diary and use it to record all project related work. Number and date each page for patent litigation purposes. If you record any new ideas, explain the idea to somebody else and have them sign and date the notebook as proof of the invention date. The notebook becomes the property of the project sponsor at the end of the course. The notebook is for the project and should not be used to take lecture notes.

Product Development Library The books below should be in the library of every professional product developer. Many of these are on reserve in Wilson Library under course numbers ENTR 6041-6042 and can be checked out for three days. Or, use your team slush fund to purchase one or more of these books. If you have additional suggestions for books, please let one of the course staff know.

Role of Faculty

Expectations of Teams

Expectations of Students

Because the course is a nine month experience, we expect you to stick with it for both semesters. If you have doubts later on, please do see one of the faculty before making any decisions.

Your first is to learn how to develop new products. The second responsibility is to serve the sponsoring company by producing the required deliverables. These two responsibilities do not conflict, but their order should be remembered.

There is more to the course than the projects. Through lectures, readings, lecture preparation assignments and project work, you will learn the basics of new product development. Hopefully, you will be able to generalize beyond the specifics of your project to be a well-rounded product development leader.

You are expected to prepare for lectures by completing the assigned readings and come ready to participate in lecture discussion. Participation in lectures and at team meetings is an important component of your grade.

Evaluation and Grading

Grading policy

1. Your team will receive a grade. Your own grade will vary up or down from the team grade depending on what you did.
2. The team grade will depend on whether good product development process was followed, the ability of the team to create a novel, working prototype and a comprehensive business plan that addresses market and financial feasibility, and whether value was returned to the sponsoring company.
3. The expected team grade is an A-. Outstanding teams will receive an A. Substandard teams will receive a grade of B+ or below.
4. For your grade to equal the team grade, you must: (1) contribute substantially to the project outcome, (2) motivate others on your team to do well, (3) spend a substantial amount of time on the project, (4) demonstrate a substantial understanding of the entire product development process, both engineering and marketing, and be able to generalize from your project and the other projects in the course, and (5) attend all class lectures and team meetings.. Note that simply putting in the hours (or even more hours than required) is not sufficient, rather you have to be the reason your project is a success and you have to demonstrate that you have become knowledgeable in the product development process.
5. Your grade will exceed the team grade if you had an outstanding contribution to the team result.
6. Your grade will be below the team grade if you did not substantially contribute to the project or could not be relied upon to complete tasks.
7. Your individual grade will be lowered by 1/2 grade (e.g from an A- to a B+) if you habitually miss class lectures or team meetings without an excused absence. If you habitually miss both lectures and team meetings, your individual grade will be lowered by one grade. In other words, attendance at lectures and team meetings is required so set that alarm clock!

Students With Disabilities