Your campus generates ideas daily.
Most are published before they're protected.
An IPR Cell is how you stop the loss.

An IPR Cell (also called an IP Cell) is the unit inside an institution responsible for identifying, capturing, evaluating and protecting the intellectual property its people create. In practice it is six things working together: a written IP policy, an invention-disclosure form and route, an evaluation committee, an awareness programme, a filing pipeline, and a maintained register. A named coordinator without those parts is a title, not a cell.

This is the question that catches most institutions out. India has no statute that automatically vests publicly funded research IP in the institution — there is no Indian equivalent of the US Bayh-Dole Act in force. Ownership therefore depends on your institutional IP policy, on employment and enrolment terms, and on the terms of any funding or collaboration agreement. If those documents are silent or contradictory, ownership is genuinely uncertain, and that uncertainty usually surfaces at the worst possible moment — when something turns out to be valuable. Getting the policy written is the fix.

For patents, public disclosure before filing generally destroys novelty, and that is difficult to undo — which is exactly why the disclosure step has to sit before publication rather than after. There are limited circumstances and other IP types where something may still be protectable, so it is worth a specialist reviewing what was disclosed, when, and in what form. But the honest answer is that prevention is the only reliable strategy here, and it's the reason an IP Cell pays for itself.

Usually yes, and usually the estimate is low. Institutions without a disclosure route have no way of knowing what they are producing, because nothing is being counted — the "few ideas a year" figure is typically the number that reached someone's attention, not the number that existed. A lightweight cell scaled to your volume costs little to run and, at minimum, settles ownership before it is contested.

The working parts — policy draft, disclosure form, committee structure, workflow — come together relatively quickly. The variable is your internal approval cycle, since the IP policy usually needs sign-off from a governing body, board or academic council that meets on a fixed schedule. We plan the engagement around that calendar. A specialist will give you a realistic timeline once we know your approval route.

Patent filings and grants form part of the research output that Indian ranking and accreditation frameworks assess, so a cell that produces filings — and keeps a register you can actually report from — contributes to those submissions. Treat it as a genuine benefit rather than the main reason to build one: frameworks and their weightings change, while the underlying case for owning your institution's research does not. We'll help structure your register so reporting is straightforward whatever the framework asks for.

Either, and often both in sequence. Most institutions want the cell staffed internally for continuity and ownership, with MYCrave establishing it, training the people who will run it, and staying available for the technical work — patentability searches, drafting, filing and prosecution — that needs a registered patent agent. We'll scope the split with you rather than assume it.

Establishment scope varies with institution size, number of departments, research volume and how much of the cell you want staffed externally. Filing costs are separate and consist of statutory government fees — which vary by applicant category — plus professional fees per application. We quote both separately and itemised, rather than publishing figures that would be inaccurate for most institutions and go out of date besides.