nanalLabs BlogSearch "who owns IP from joint research" and you'll usually land on a single sentence: co-owned in proportion to each party's share. In practice, two different questions hide behind that sentence. One is which institution holds how much of the resulting patent. The other is whose name belongs on it as an inventor. The first is answered by statute and the consortium agreement; the second by inventorship law. Treat them as the same question and you get reasoning like "our institution's share is 60%, so we just need 60% of the named inventors to be ours" — reasoning that collapses the moment a registration-invalidation challenge or an employee-invention compensation dispute tests it.
Institutional share is a matter of contract
Korea's National R&D Innovation Act generally assigns R&D output to the institution that carried out the project, once it has taken assignment from the researchers — but where multiple institutions jointly perform a project, the statute allows joint ownership, with the split following each institution's role and contribution. In practice that split isn't a number the law hands you; it's whatever the consortium agreement fixed before the project started, typically pegged to something like each party's share of government funding.
That share is contractual. It has nothing to do with who actually had the idea — it's whatever the agreement says, and it hardens the moment the agreement is signed. Skip the IP clause when a joint project kicks off, and you're negotiating it retroactively after results exist, which rarely goes well for whoever didn't read it closely enough at the start.
Inventorship is decided by contribution, not contract
Who gets named as inventor on a patent application, by contrast, can't be fixed by contract at all. Under patent law, an inventor is someone who made a substantive creative contribution to the technical idea itself — not someone whose institution happened to be a project participant, who managed the budget, or who merely gave instructions. Patent office guidance on determining joint inventorship lays out a rough dividing line:
| Likely counts as an inventor | Usually does not |
|---|---|
| Proposed the approach or the concrete experimental design | Managed the project, allocated budget or staff |
| Ran experiments while contributing technical ideas | Followed instructed procedures without creative input |
| Interpreted results to complete the invention's structure | Did literature review, data entry, or statistics only |
The same guidance is explicit that a co-research institution and a co-inventor are different concepts. A co-inventor automatically shares in the resulting patent right under joint-invention doctrine; a co-research institution shares in it only because a contract or statute says so. Since inventions made by participating researchers on a national R&D project are typically employee inventions, the employing institution takes assignment of the right to patent under the Invention Promotion Act — in proportion to each individual inventor's contribution. That individual-level split is a different number from the institution-level share in the consortium agreement, and conflating the two is exactly the mistake described above.
When it's disputed, the record that gets read is the notebook
What an inventorship dispute or invalidation proceeding actually litigates is a question of fact — who conceived or ran which experiment, and when — and the primary evidence for that is the lab notebook. It's also why the National R&D Research Note Guideline requires each participating researcher to keep their own separate notebook rather than one shared notebook for the team (projects can request an exception, but that's the default). If one person writes up the whole team's work in their own notebook, there's simply no record left to support a colleague's later claim of "that idea was mine."
To keep this kind of dispute from developing in the first place:
- Each participating researcher records their own experiments and ideas in
their own notebook — no single person writing on behalf of the group.
- When an idea surfaces in a meeting or discussion, record who proposed it,
not just the outcome.
- Keep dated originals of materials, emails, and meeting notes exchanged
with researchers at partner institutions.
- Fix the timestamp on any prior idea that predates formal experiments, in
case "who thought of it first" is later contested.
A quick check for your project
- Does the consortium agreement spell out IP ownership and allocation?
- Is each participating researcher actually keeping an individual
notebook — or is one person writing for the group?
- Are you conflating institutional share with individual inventor
contribution?
- Are proposers of ideas raised in meetings and discussions being recorded
by name?
- Can you later prove, to a third party, when materials exchanged with a
partner institution actually existed?
Institutional share comes from the agreement; inventorship comes from contribution — mix the two up and you risk filing a patent that matches your consortium's ownership split but misstates the actual inventors, inviting an invalidation or employee-compensation dispute down the line. If you're starting a joint project, it's worth treating the agreement's ownership clause and each researcher's individual notebook as two separate things to get right from day one. Regulations can change, so verify against the current text and your institution's own rules before relying on any of this.