As it draws up plans to become a for-profit corporation, Singularity University has significantly tightened the terms under which its students may use the intellectual property they develop in team projects at the school.

When it was created four years ago with support from neighboring Google and Google's co-founder Larry Page, the prestigious but non-accredited institution was all about teaching "exponentially advancing technologies" as a supplement to a traditional education. Now Singularity U. apparently believes it can best promote those technologies and address humanity's biggest problems by better controlling and assisting student startups, reading between the lines of new contracts students are being asked to sign.

Students in Singularity University's elite summer Graduate Studies Program, a veritable startup launching pad based out of the NASA Ames Research Park in Silicon Valley, were earlier this summer presented with agreements giving the university wide latitude to negotiate royalties and equity and to deny the students use of the ideas and software they develop in the program. In exchange for letting students develop their university projects into startups, Singularity University may now demand an ownership stake of any size or even deny approval entirely if the student does not become an "alumni in good standing" or if the startup would not sufficiently advance the university's mission. Students must also meet a series of application deadlines if they wish to license back their ideas.

In contrast, last summer's agreements specified that the university grants royalty-free licenses to students and seeks only a 2 percent ownership stake in their startups as matters of policy. It specified no deadlines, restrictions on startup concept or requirements about maintaining "good standing." Restrictions on intellectual property now take up four paragraphs in the agreement, as compared to one paragraph in summer 2011, a review of the documents shows.

“It’s becoming a company all the way,” says one recent summer-program graduate. “It’s been a big shift. ... If you asked me now, ‘Would you like to come to SU?’ I would say ‘Yes, for the first five [of ten] weeks,’ because they gather an incredible group of people. But the last [three] weeks is about working on a company SU is going to [partially] own. ... And they can take it out of your hands forever.”

According to the university, the issue isn't so much control but resolving conflicts before they start.

"Our previous student agreements did not fully address all situations that could arise within our community of students, specifically how multiple students or alumni can utilize the same IP," CEO Rob Nail writes. "Our latest student agreement clarifies this question."

The university's overseers see commercialization as key to their mission and are searching for ways to trade Singularity U.'s nonprofit structure for a new status as a profit-making California benefit corporation, as Wired Business reported previously. That groundbreaking conversion, and the university's parallel effort to control how students use intellectual property, are being closely watched in alternative education circles, where profit has become a hot topic.

The university was the birthplace of startups like TechCrunch Disrupt winner Getaround, a service that lets you rent your car to strangers. The university's nonprofit status bars it from actively incubating startups by, for example, investing money. But the university would like to do exactly that as it seeks ways to shepherd into the marketplace the ambitious team technology projects developed in the summer graduate program. Its new intellectual property restrictions pave the way for that type of aggressive commercialization.

Some faculty, including serial startup founder David Orban, think seizing more control of its intellectual property will help the university more rapidly and effectively respond to technological progress and social change. The university gets more power to pick winners and influence who carries ideas beyond academia into the market. "How you leverage ideas is at the heart of how to keep innovation flowing," Orban says. "Singularity University is being true to itself and accepting the change is necessary. Rather than change being something that happens to it, the university is embracing it and seeking it out."

At the same time, it seems odd that a charitable education institution is acting to restrict the flow of knowledge, particularly when its stated mission is to impart such knowledge and to "inspire a new generation of leaders." Singularity University has promoted the idea of do-it-yourself biohacking and the open-sourcing of biotech, and it has often embraced open-source software development. But sometimes, Singularity apparently believes, the best way to help humanity adapt to new technologies is to hold secrets close and to convert them into profits. That philosophy certainly worked for Apple Inc.; whether it can work for a would-be savior of mankind remains to be seen.

This article had been modified from the original, which misstated the origins of Curetogether, a health website. (July 31, 7:33pm ET)

This article has been modified from the original, which in one section implied Singularity University was restricting intellectual property beyond what students develop in their team projects, and which contained a quote implying the university might be taking full rather than partial ownership of some projects, contradicting what had been stated previously in the article. A Singularity U spokesperson says "the IP policy was tightened to protect all participants’ rights to the IP created within the Team Projects, to moderate any disputes that may arise among various team members, and not to increase SU ownership or as a profit motive." (August 18 5:10pm ET)