History of the Lambert Working Group on IP

The Lambert Review on Business-University Collaborations chaired by Richard Lambert, former editor of the Financial Times and formerly a member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England and now Director General of the CBI, reported in December 2003 - Full Text of the Lambert Review and its Recommendations External Link.

The objectives of the review, conducted on behalf of the Treasury, were to:

  • highlight opportunities for business-university collaboration;
  • identify successful business-university collaborations that could serve as role models; and
  • offer ideas to stimulate debate and shape policy.

Chapter 3 of the review looked at the issue of knowledge transfer in business-university collaborations and made a number of recommendations (see Chapter 3). One of these was that key stakeholders representing universities and business should work together to produce a small set of model collaborative research agreements for voluntary use by industry and universities (see Recommendation 3.5), and that these agreements should set out a range of approaches to the ownership and exploitation of IP including, for example, ownership of IP by the university with exclusive or non-exclusive licensing to the business.

The Lambert Working Group on Intellectual Property was set up to achieve the above mentioned objective in May 2004 and was also chaired by Richard Lambert.

Members of the Working Group include key stakeholders such as The Association of University Research & Industry Links (AURIL), CBI, Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), PraxisUnico, a number of UK companies, universities, and several government departments.

The Intellectual Property Office is the secretariat to the Lambert Group.