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Today's academic world helps to shape the minds of the future. Universities and colleges nurture tomorrow's engineers, lawyers, researchers, designers, managers and entrepreneurs. Europe's educational institutions are the best place to raise awareness of intellectual property (IP), and this is precisely what the Academia unit of the European Patent Academy is doing. Every student needs to know what IP is and how to use the patent system to support innovation.
The unit also focuses on specific faculties in universities and research centres, and co-operates with the staff of Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), who work alongside university researchers and students.
Getting the message across
The Academia unit is creating networks of universities which include IP as part of their syllabus, or wish to do so. It encourages universities which already offer IP content to expand existing programmes and introduce IP as a compulsory subject.
Students at all levels, undergraduates and postgraduates, need to understand that patents are a source of technical information and commercial intelligence, as well as being stimuli for innovation and tools to facilitate technology transfer.
In order to reach as many students as possible, the Academia unit is training trainers - professors, teachers and staff of TTOs - as well as policy-makers dealing with IP matters in an educational framework.
The Academia unit offers its expertise to those European IP teaching and research networks, such as the European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) and the European Intellectual Property Institutes Network (EIPIN), which can help to disseminate messages.
How the Academy makes a difference
The Academia unit is taking IP teaching beyond the law departments and into the scientific and engineering faculties. It is also addressing business and innovation management students, showing them how to make use of the patent system.
The Academia unit is helping the European academic world to make the transition to a new era, in which the patent is recognised as an important technology transfer tool. It promotes the inclusion of new, relevant topics, such as the economics of patents, exploitation of patents and IP management, in the curricula of educational institutions. These new courses also teach that knowledge can be extracted from patents, and illustrate how patents can best be exploited.
In support of its objectives, the Academia unit works with IP teaching experts to establish minimum standards and essential elements for IP education.
The Academia unit supports IP training activities of academic institutions and European academic IP associations. The European Patent Summer School is offered for students and teaching staff alike; and for young university graduates, the Academia unit runs internship programmes at the EPO, allowing them to gain first-hand experience in the world of patent-related IP.