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Intellectual Property Policy

As an impact investor for the Great Lakes, we support projects that result in new inventions, copyrightable works, and other creative products. We want these products to be able to deliver the greatest possible benefits to the Great Lakes ecosystem, even after our support ends. We also understand that inventors want to benefit from their work and have a stake in its growth.

Here’s a summary of our approach to this issue:

  • We expect to own anything invented with our support. Even so, we don’t expect to own any intellectual property created before we started work together or developed outside the project we support.
  • In some cases, we agree to work with teams that will own the new intellectual property created in their project. In these cases, we retain a license to use the invention to support our mission and receive a share of any revenue generated by the invention.

All our support agreements include language that formalizes our rights to new intellectual property created with our support. You’ll have to sign off on these conditions to work with us.

Please Contact Us if you have any questions about this policy and how it might affect your project.