Work Package 8, led by INLECOM Systems Ltd, focuses on coordinating and protecting the Intellectual Property, guiding the filing of minimum patents with the the ultimate goal of protecting and retaining the commercially strategic IP “for Europe” and “within Europe”, in turn giving commercialising actors within the consortium a competitive advantage on a worldwide stage.

Specifically, Task 8.1 focused on  the management and protection of VARCITIES intellectual property, including patents, copyrights, and trademarks, balancing commercialisation and open-access goals. D8.1 details the project’s IPR strategy, processes, and filing priorities.

Executive Summary

D8.1 documents the management and protection of intellectual property (IP) and intellectual property rights (IPR) generated within the VARCITIES project, which focused on visionary nature-based solutions (NbS) for health, wellbeing, and resilience in cities. The project prioritized identifying, assessing, and safeguarding innovative outputs that could have commercial value, resulting in a minimum of 2-3 strategic patents being filed, in line with the Grant Agreement. Training sessions and workshops ensured all consortium partners, especially SMEs, were well-informed about IP procedures and best practices.

The IP management process involved multiple steps, including the distribution of Simplified Invention Disclosure Forms, preliminary assessments of proposed inventions, and discussions between inventors, project experts, and patent attorneys. A formal patent adjudication meeting led to the selection of four inventions for filing, covering innovations such as IoT-based microclimatic modeling, microclimate sensors, and crowdsourced pollution detection for urban mobility. Some filings have already been granted, and others are undergoing prosecution, with an additional European counterpart filed to extend patent protection across the EU.

Beyond commercial patents, VARCITIES maintained an Innovation Registry to track broader innovative outputs, some of which were compiled into 11 Key Exploitable Results (KERs) shared on the Innovations Radar Platform. This structured approach has highlighted the high quality of innovation within the project and its potential to support the uptake of NbS, demonstrating both commercial opportunities and wider societal benefits for urban communities.

This is a confidential deliverable, as such the full deliverable is not available to the public.