Minister of Education Plasterk strives to give researchers more financial interest in turning their research into products. “For example, researchers could get proprietary rights of part of the benefits of the intellectual property.” At the moment an employed inventor has no rights to the profit of a patent. “My colleague Maria van der Hoeven and I both are of the opinion that we should change the legislation on this: researchers should get a percentage of the profit of intellectual property, just like in America,” says Plasterk last week at a congress on valorisation at Rotterdam.

Perhaps the minister takes an example in the TU Delft. Recently they have an agreement which states that an inventor has right to a third of the profit from a patent. Another one third goes to his research group and the last one third goes to the university.

Source: Science Guide