NIST announces winners of PEER Prize for incentivizing Bayh-Dole compliance

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced on December 30 the winners of its Partners Engaged in Extramural Reporting (PEER) Prize Challenge, which invited solutions to incentivize the recipients of federal R&D funding to comply with Bayh-Dole reporting requirements.

The PEER Prize is funded using NIST Lab-to-Market (L2M) funds. The L2M program supports interagency efforts to advance the President’s Management Agenda’s Cross-Agency Priority goal to improve transfer of federally funded technologies from the lab to the marketplace.

The prize competition awarded $10,000 in prize money spread among the top three finishers as determined by an expert panel of judges.

"Encouraging universities and companies to follow Bayh-Dole regulations will result in more timely reporting of federally funded inventions and downstream licensing," said Dr. Mojdeh Bahar, Associate Director for Innovation and Industry Services at NIST, in a video announcing the winners. "This will in turn help the government access data to ensure accurate reporting of R&D outcomes and improve the management of extramural funding programs."

Fourteen submissions were received.

The overall winner was Rhonda Kivlin, the Intellectual Property Administrator at Northeastern University. Her entry proposes a three-pronged approach to incentivize increased Bayh-Dole compliance by creating a compliance wizard to guide users through reporting inventions, developing comprehensive training modules for compliance, and instituting a certification for completion of the training modules.

Second and third prizes went to Nicholas LeBlanc, License Maintenance and Compliance Manager in North Carolina State University's Office of Research Commercialization. Second prize went to LeBlanc's proposal of a common metric that institutions can use to assess Bayh-Dole compliance using existing iEdison data. Third prize went to his proposal of an online interface to streamline the Bayh-Dole reporting system.

Read more, view the video, and access full text of the winning entries: https://www.nist.gov/tpo/peer/nist-peer-prize-winners