Collaboration ain't always easy.

Sometimes it takes many months, occasionally more than a year, for IT vendors and university researchers to agree on who owns the intellectual property of industry-funded IT research at some of America's top schools. Such delays have prompted some vendors to direct some of their university-bound R&D funding to universities overseas, institutions less fussy about IP rights. Those concerns are voiced in a video podcast.

Earlier this week (see story "U.S. Universities Loosen Grip On Tech Rights To Keep Vendor Grants From Going Overseas"), four tech vendors (Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Intel) and seven research universities (Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford, University of California, University of Illinois, and University of Texas) agreed to a set of principles to guide collaborative IT research funded by the industry and conducted by university researchers. Simply, the knowledge generated would be made available to all.

This Open Collaboration Principles, brokered by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation are a good first step that should hasten to market ideas created in university labs.