Intellectual Property (IP) & Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs)
Overview:
As a Center for Entrepreneurship, we often get asked about "non-disclosure agreements" or NDAs. As a normal practice, orgs that work with early-stage entrepreneurs don’t sign NDAs. This is true of the Apex Center, as well as other common-use resources at VT and universities across the country. It’s also true of external mentors and early-stage investors. While we understand the questions around “protecting your concept” and the thought process, IP protection and NDAs are usually not needed and impractical for the first stages of building and launching your startup.
Here’s our viewpoint:
Many entrepreneurs are initially guarded about their ideas. This is natural, but it's important to realize that success in startups is all about execution (not starting with the right idea). We routinely see hundreds of startup concepts each year, many of them similar in nature. By virtue of bumping your concept up against the market (prospective users/customers), the solution you have envisioned right now will almost certainly change. Therefore taking concrete steps to protect an unproven and unvalidated concept is impractical and inefficient. To be successful, you'll have to be able to communicate your concept effectively to other people in a non-proprietary way to attract customers, team members, partners, etc. Your idea isn’t IP. The most successful entrepreneurs build in public, not behind a curtain.
Startups are hard and every entrepreneur needs help. Especially for early-stage entrepreneurs where you need mentorship, network introductions and conversations with prospective customers. Practically speaking, you can’t have all these stakeholders sign NDAs. Therefore, your goal as a founder is to work on a compelling way to communicate your startup concept without disclosing anything you feel may be proprietary. This isn't our opinion; it's the standard practice in tech startup ecosystems.
When does IP come into play:
Intellectual Property is an important aspect of startups, and something the Apex Center can help you develop, but IP fits into later stages of new ventures once you've locked a group of potential users and are building + testing real solutions. We refer to this milestone as “MVP with recurring traction.” Note this is not the same as an initial product release thrown together to test demand. For teams who meet the proper milestones, we have partnered law firms to help determine next steps and the if/when for intellectual property.
Virginia Tech’s policy on Intellectual Property:
Virginia Tech has a very student-friendly IP policy on all creative works. TL:DR - Virginia Tech generally does not claim ownership of intellectual property (IP) created by students, allowing them to retain rights to their scholarly and artistic works. This includes usage of “common use” assets to develop your works, such as: wifi, open access buildings (Newman library and associated studios) and open student programs (such as the Apex Center).
However, the university may claim ownership if the IP is developed while employed by the university, or if substantial, non-incidental university resources are used such as specialized faculty research labs or corporate sponsored research projects.
See our VT IP policy 13000 overview page for details.
Conclusion:
Entrepreneurship is a learning process, and NDAs/IP have an important place in startups. However, it's important that early-stage entrepreneurs understand the idea/proprietary info is likely not the most important aspect at this stage in moving your concept forward and can be a burdensome distraction of time and money if addressed too early in the maturation of your business. Here is an additional article by a very prominent startup advisor on the subject of NDAs, IP and developing startups.
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