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[Guest Post] IP Education Series #4

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New year, new installment of the IP Education Series! (Previous posts: Intro, #1, #2, and #3) This Professor Dinusha Mendis, illustrates where the minds of IP and engineering students meet with fantastic results!
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Over to Dinusha:

Learning from each other at University – when IP law and engineering students collaborate…

Intellectual property is a valuable asset to buy, sell and license. Millions of businesses around the world use it as a mechanism for protecting, commercialising and exploiting their innovative brands, designs, creative work and innovations. Starting to understand IP at an early stage, for example at University, can therefore be a significant benefit for aspiring innovators and businesses. Opening doors for collaboration with IP law students, at that stage, can enrich that experience – as seen through the IP-Design Collaboration Project at Bournemouth University (BU).

The IP-Design and Engineering Collaboration Project at Bournemouth University

The IP-Design collaborative project at Bournemouth University (BU) brings together final year undergraduate IP law and engineering students – who learn from each other. The final year project for engineering students involves bringing an innovation to life and in collaboration with the final year IP students, inventions and intellectual property are brought to life.

At an operational level, the students are paired into groups at the beginning of the IP unit, which normally includes 2 law students to 2-3 design and engineering students. The project begins with both groups of students meeting each other at a seminar addressed by an IP practitioner and an Engineering practitioner. At a practical level, final year IP law students advise their ‘clients’ – the engineering students – through (a) an advice letter and (b) an oral presentation which forms the IP students’ final year assignment. The ‘clients’ are invited to the oral presentation and encouraged to ask questions from their ‘lawyers’ about the advice being given.

Over the years, it has been a rewarding experience to witness some remarkable innovations such as a cake icing pen, a computer game controlled by brain power, a glamping pod amongst others and watch intellectual property law coming to life, through its direct application in the form of written and oral advice.

The opportunity to apply IP law to real-life scenarios and to real-life innovations makes this project truly unique. It assists design and engineering students to grasp the importance of IP law, whilst encouraging the law students to present their advice without bringing in legal jargon. It presents challenges for both parties, but students certainly learn from each other and understand the importance of IP at a very practical level.

The project has culminated in prizes for the best IP student and best IP-design and engineering group awarded by a retired patent attorney. In fact, IPKat’s very own Dr Hayleigh Bosher, was the recipient of the Best IP Law student prize in 2012 – when studying the IP unit at Bournemouth University!

It Does Not Happen Overnight …

The collaboration project has been started many years ago – under the leadership of Professor Ruth Soetendorp. It has gone through many iterations, over the years, as a result of learning through the various challenges it has presented. Being a cross-faculty initiative, it presents its own challenges. Moreover, group work which involves law and engineering students in their final years is demanding inasmuch as it requires dedicated time, more so than any other unit and that is another factor.

A Rewarding Experience for All

However, meeting various challenges and overcoming them has led to the collaborative project being ‘fine-tuned’, it’s been a privilege to have led the IP Unit and the IP-design and engineering collaboration project since January 2011 at BU. It has also been adopted at other universities including Aston. It is undoubtedly an incredibly rewarding experience and throughout the years, students have benefited greatly from the collaborative project as well as speaking about it at their job interviews.

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[Guest Post] IP Education Series #3

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This week's installment of the IP Education Series is here (previous posts: Intro, #1, and #2). Continuing the series is Dr Janice Denoncourt, with a post on Gen. Z and IP Education:

Generation Z, IP Education and UN2030 SDG 9
Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

Sustainability is now a prominent theme in university teaching and research in my own institution and others across the UK and further afield. For example, the University of Oslo Law School held its first ‘IP and Sustainability Workshop’ on 15 June 2018. An edited collection to disseminate the academic contributions to that initiative is on track for publication in 2020.

In my university lectures and seminars, I have the pleasure of teaching and listening to many students who are passionate about the environment and the future they will have on our planet Earth. They seek a deeper understanding of the role of IP rights in society. WIPO holds that over four hundred years of history has shown that effective national and international IP systems are an essential and powerful tool to support global innovation and creativity. In education pedagogy terms, knowledge of the variety of IP rights transverses disciplines - a lifelong skill or competency used across academic subject areas. For example, IP education supports citizenship, entrepreneurship, the arts, ICT and STEM education and will now also begin to more visibly support sustainability. For the planet to sustain a future predicted population of 8.5 billion by 2030, innovation and creativity will be vital to driving more efficient and better use of our resources.

The new academic year is well underway in UK universities and higher education institutions in the northern hemisphere. IP law is now a standard elective offered on most qualifying law degree (LLB) courses and continues to increase in popularity, especially with students who regard the subject as ‘new’ law at the centre of the creative and innovation economies. There are many themes that run through the IP law, a discipline that is constantly adapting, whether in response to technological advancement or as a result of shifting perceptions regarding the appropriate reach of IP protection. In early 2019, I embedded a new, contemporary theme, namely, the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation into my IP law syllabi.

The global task of achieving the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has the overarching societal goal of ensuring ‘development that meets the needs of the present while safeguarding Earth’s life-support system, on which the welfare of current and future generations depends’. In October 2019, my own institution (Nottingham Trent University), advised all academic staff that embracing ‘Sustainability’ is part the institution’s strategic plan going forward. In terms of curriculum development, NTU launched a UN SDG training and development module ‘Sustainability Teaching Resources’ to assist its lecturers in embedding 'sustainability' into curricula across the university. The 30' online module focuses on how academics can relate their teaching to the UN SDGs and encourages staff to engage with different aspects of the UN SDGs to enhance teaching and learning. In other words, the UN’s sustainable agenda is being prioritised.

Sustainable development necessarily has an IP dimension - especially UN SDG 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure which aims to ‘Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation’. Once students link the aims of SDG 9 to the IP law framework, they begin to critically evaluate the role of IP in a more holistic manner. In early 2019, I piloted IP and sustainability as a topic in my LLM IP law modules. I found that introducing SDG 9 generates positive discussions of the inventions afforded protection by time-limited monopolies and the delicate balance with competition law and other stakeholders. This approach also enables students to reflect on controversial issues such as global warming, the role of competition law, open-source innovation and software licences, among others. SDG 9 provides a contemporary IP education platform to illustrate the need to balance competing interests, through respectful discussion to arrive at potential solutions. With an increasingly diverse cohorts of students from a variety of national, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds this is no easy task. However, SDG 9 provides a focus for students, whether they hail from a developed country or lesser-developed states, to contribute and potentially be inspired to see their role in the future sustainable global innovation ecosystem.

In my own article research on the subject, Corporate Intellectual Property Assets and UN 2030 Sustainability Goal 9 Innovation’ (2019) Vol 19, Part 2 Journal of Corporate Law Studies, I examine whether the corporate law concept of ‘stewardship’ has import for the IP rights law framework alongside ‘ownership’ in the emerging literature. The Green Channel is a way to accelerate patent applications for inventions that have an environmental benefit. As research-led teaching is desirable, the class critically discusses how the UKIPO’s green patent channel supports sustainability.

For the latest and next generation of IP law students, sustainability will likely be an umbrella theme of their generation (not to mention Brexit!). With the help of our brightest IP aware minds, I wonder what new creations and inventions will transform our existence on planet Earth in the next decade?

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[Guest Post] IP Education Series #2

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The latest installment of the IP Education Series is here (previous posts: Intro and #1). But, before we get into the post, myself and Ruth would like to thank those of you who have got in contact with us detailing your thoughts, comments, and contributions! Please continue to do so: we would like to encourage all further engagement. Continuing the series is IP Lawyer Agathe Michel-de Cazotte, writing on her experience supporting the IP Management module:

Basic IP knowledge: a decisive asset for business students

Dealing with innovation is key to future decision makers

When I first walked into Cass Business School (City, University of London), I knew the message I wanted to convey to the students. I would soon find out what they were looking for, as they were allowed to listen in for a week or two, and then choose whether or not they would attend the IP module during the term. The challenge was to demonstrate that having basic IP knowledge was relevant whatever business career they eventually decided to embrace. I was advising an IoT company in valuing its IP rights at the time and I wanted these business students to walk out of our first session having understood the ins and outs of this type of IP portfolio and how innovation and business strategies work hand-in-hand. Let's be honest, that session was not a difficult one at all: the classroom was full of tech-savvy, marketing and design sensitive, keen young adults who wanted to understand precisely what was behind a structured innovation strategy.

As a private practitioner, teaching IP to non-law students is a fascinating experiment, and I was thrilled by the opportunity to have a look at the legal tools I use each day for my clients in a different way. I have to admit that students very strongly challenge the established rules, and that discussing practical innovation strategy decisions with them has proven to be extremely interesting each time.

How much law do business students want ?

Having lectured in that module a couple of times now, I know that the challenging aspect lies rather in determining the right balance between key legal concepts, which one cannot ignore when dealing with IP, and staying as close as possible to the innovation related decisions taken by various teams within a company.

Keep it practical and bespoke

As private practitioners, bringing in real-life examples and making it about the company's innovation rather than about the local IP rules is something we are used to doing. However, we do it knowing our client and understanding the drivers and obstacles in their market. When teaching, it is crucial that what we talk about resonates with the students. To a certain extent, we picture what feels familiar to them; however, there are aspects we simply cannot guess such as the field they want to work in, or have already had a summer job experience in. We have had musicians asking us whether their music "inspired" by other pieces was actually theirs, App programmers suddenly realizing what open source software meant, students considering participating in an existing business and looking for guidance in protecting and monetizing intangible assets. This information helps us determine which real-life examples to use and the way to do so, in order to ensure that students engage with the topics in a very personal way if possible, or at least in a familiar one if they do not have pressing creation/innovation questions on their minds. The key issue is indeed not what topics to teach as they need to have an understanding of the full range of IPRs, but rather determining the optimal way for the message to get across to a group of business students.

What about jurisprudence?

The majority of them won't learn legal rules through jurisprudence as we did in law school – even in our civil law countries. At the end of the semester, only very few actually remember a set of facts and how the legal finding associated to it came about. Nevertheless, they end up analysing the IP strategy of a large company, and it is fair to say that we usually receive in-depth reports which clearly show that they have absolutely understood the key steps in shaping an IP strategy and the legal concepts underlying the IPRs. If the result is there, i.e. if our students will be part of the few marketing, advertisement, or sales teams who have an instinctive IP reaction in the appropriate situation, and know e.g. when to keep an IP asset confidential, how to do so, and the reasons and ways of using it, some might ask why bother with jurisprudence? For us lawyers the fact that, in the grounds of a decision, the origin and logic of the legal rule come out, is certainly a good enough reason. For a business student in particular, jurisprudence is necessary also in realizing that law is evolving and that, even if codified law remains unchanged, rules can be construed differently at different times and by different courts; as well as in understanding what IP related issues lead to litigation and the risk a company exposes itself to by ignoring established rules.

Business students want to implement the law

Students at Cass Business School have elected the module because they recognize that IP should be a useful practical tool in their future careers. They thus actively engage with the IP rules they learn, thinking through what they would decide if they had an IP asset, e.g. by discussing the ins and outs of an IPR with a guest having started a company or managing a company's IP portfolio, or even by challenging innovation strategy decisions of established companies. Each tutorial also allows the smaller group to confront views on the right way of managing IP at a very detailed level and taking into account various business drivers on top of the IP rules.

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[Guest Post] IP Education Series #1

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[Guest Post] Introduction to the IP Education Series

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The IPKat is excited to welcome the following series of blog posts on IP Education initiatives. We're kicking off the series with an introduction from Ruth Soetendorp, providing a flavour of the upcoming posts and where we're looking for your participation and feedback. Without further ado, it's over to Ruth:

"Over the next few months, IP Education specialists have been invited by the Kats to share IP education wit and wisdom. There will be a short series of posts, which I’m looking forward to curating and presenting, by innovative IP Educators, and YOU. Especially if you have something to share that has worked when teaching IP (or lessons learnt from something that hasn’t!)

The posts will feature the experience of IP enthusiasts who have been inspired, or driven, to come up with creative approaches to conveying the subtleties of intellectual property to students who, by and large, have had no other exposure to law or IP. Lack of legal experience will not have deterred such students from choosing an IP module on their university course. They realize their careers could be spent creating IP rights for themselves and others, as well as interacting with other people’s IP rights,

It will be great to welcome contributions from academics, IP practitioners, and industry specialists whose input to Higher Education IP modules enhances the IP learning experience. Students too are welcome to share their IP education experience. This series of guest posts won’t spotlight IP online resources or texts, but I’m sure their use will feature significantly.

Despite rising levels of student interest in learning about IP, the challenges facing academic Higher Education IP educators are immense, and sometimes feel insurmountable. Greatest of these firstly is to persuade non-law faculty to allow IP education into a programme. There is often reluctance to make space for a topic that students value but their teachers don’t fully understand. Secondly, to persuade a REF focused academic employer that there is value in researching conference papers or journal articles that focus on developing IP education knowledge and skills. If you have encountered these challenges, and ‘won through’ it will be wonderful to learn how you did it!

IP Educators are successfully breaking down barriers between faculties, building dialogues, and introducing interdisciplinary activities that are fun and enhance IP learning. Does that include you? You may be working with practitioners or with social media, with customized resources or industrialists, with gaming or with the professions, with tried and tested resources or with the unexpected. Or in ways we haven’t even thought of! It will be great to hear from you."

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Nexus

[Guest Post] IP Education Series #4

[Guest Post] IP Education Series #3

[Guest Post] IP Education Series #2

[Guest Post] IP Education Series #1

[Guest Post] Introduction to the IP Education Series

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