Collaborative relationships with industrial partners
The Industrial Agreements Office is focused on post-contractual partnership management from financial issues to project support and alliances.
The Industrial Agreements Office is responsible for all industrial, ongoing or closed, agreements: licenses, R&D collaborations, consulting agreements, co-ownership, as well as inventor follow-up.
Each industrial collaboration or patent license agreement is led, within our team, by an alliance manager who leads steering committees and conducts meetings with each of our licensees each year.
Business and financial cases
For each contract, the Industrial Agreements Office implements the financial resources required to meet partnership objectives and monitors partner contributions (deliverables, human resources, cash, knowledge, intellectual property, equipment). The office works jointly with the Financial Department and the Principal Investigator.
Researchers from various national and international research organizations are involved in our scientific teams, so our patents are frequently held in co-ownership. As a source of technological wealth, these patent ownership shares may give rise to complex legal and financial issues. The Industrial Agreements Office reduces this co-ownership hurdle by directly interfacing with the co-owners for all contract management aspects.
Our acknowledged proficiency in documenting and handling relationships with co-owners allows industrial partners to have a single point of contact while accessing technologies developed by different academic actors.
Balanced Partnership
The role of the Industrial Agreements Office is to ensure the fairness of partnerships in terms of the distribution of responsibilities, investments, risks and benefits.
With its detailed knowledge of the Institut Pasteur's projects and researchers, as well as the needs of industrial partners and general market priorities, the Industrial Agreements Office can assess the value generated by projects, play a conciliatory role, support scientists, and perpetuate relationships with partners.
In order to build a strong, dynamic and long-term alliance with industrial partners, the operational and executive management of the partnership is based on:
- detailed, long-term operational planning of projects. The creation and assurance of performance metrics (set up with the Financial Department) ensures the partnership is tracked and modified as needed.
- alliance governance capable of defining the purpose of the partnership, managing outcomes, goals and critical success factors by ensuring its organizational alignment, and monitoring performance metrics and value generated, etc. Alliance goals are added to the legal agreement.
- launch and management: kick-off meetings organized internally and/or with partners for each new industrial collaboration. These administrative and financial kick-off meetings aim to establish a project team and to start with a common level of information for all stakeholders on the framework, on financial and administrative resources, and scientific and societal aspects of the project.
- flexibility: at some point, the contract and intention of the alliance may change or not achieve the required results. Based on our close relationships with scientific and industrial partners, we are able to identify any need for change as it arises.