What’s the secret to success that every aspiring entrepreneur has learned from watching the smash hit reality-TV display Shark Tank?
“Unless you have a patent or some proprietary engineering, ” Shark Tank host Robert Herjavec has said time and time again to contenders, “you’re gonna be in trouble.”
After which he invariably announces, “I’m out! ”
To be sure, patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets — collectively, intellectual property( IP) — are not the only the resource requirements for business success. But there is no denying that the intellectual property rights to an innovation — and knowing how to leverage them — are vital to get funded by undertaking investors.
Nor is there any doubt that IP plays a pivotal role in powering today’s knowledge economy, where intangible assets such as IP represent more than 80 percentage of the market value of all publicly traded companies. Indeed, intellectual-property-intensive industries now account for a surprising 38. 2 percent of total US GDP, according to one US Department of Commerce report. That’s more than$ 6 trillion a year, more than the GDP of any other commonwealth except China. IP-based industries are also responsible for 30 percentage, of national job, or roughly 40 million jobs.
Yet despite IP’s enormous role in the US economy, few universities give any sort of course on IP to undergraduates. Among the first is the University of Southern California, which last fall launched a course on the basic functionings of patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. The new course, through the Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies within USC’s Marshall School of Business, provides an opportunity to develop tomorrow’s leaders in the skills they need to navigate our increasingly IP-driven economy.
Pioneered by USC President C. L. Max Nikias and billionaire medical discoverer Dr. Gary Michelson, the course, titled “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Intellectual Property, ” was taught by Kirkland& Ellis partner Luke Dauchot, a trial lawyer specializing in complex IP. Aside from class lecturings, the course also furnished its 65 students an IP textbook designed for non-lawyers and a specially produced series of animated four-minute videos highlighting everyday patent, trademark, and copyright issues such as business.
The course also attracted a who’s who of global IP luminaries as guest talkers, including former Patent Office director David Kappos, Facebook IP chief and former Google head of patents Allen Lo, Dolby Laboratories General Counsel Andy Sherman, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi’s head of IP strategy Paul Lin, and the IP leaders of Apple, Nike, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and Dollar Shave , among others. The “father of modern corporate IP strategy, ” Marshall Phelps, who over the last 30 times built and led both IBM’s and Microsoft’s world IP operations, attended the first week of classes.
“I was truly struck by these students’ keen interest in IP, ” says Phelps. “Let’s face it, most people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about patents and trade secrets. But not these kids. They may not know a whole lot about the specifics of patent law — and why should they, I signify, that’s why God fabricated lawyers, right? But they do know that IP issues shape many regions of modern life today, and could be critical to their success as entrepreneurs.”
Just consider, Phelps reminded students during his talk, how the smartphone patent conflicts, including Apple’s billion-dollar patent suit against Samsung, helped ascertain wins and losers in the wireless industry. Or how the “Blurred Lines” copyright violation judgment against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams has reshaped music-production practises, making artists much more reluctant to borrow even general musical “themes” from previous artists without credit and compensation.
Students say they found the course worthwhile. “This class actually drilled into our chiefs that in the modern IP-driven global economy, IP generation, protection, and enforcement was necessary, ” says Jack O’Grady, a junior physics major. “That’s a view that’s often overlooked in traditional business class or startup culture.”
Natalie Monger, a junior with a dual major in computer science and business administration, says the course helped demonstrate her how to safeguard a software system she is creating to assistance dancers manage their teaching, choreographing, and performing selections. “I would not have learned this had such courses not been offered to me as an undergraduate, ” she adds.
David Belasco, executive director of the Greif Center, says the course was a “definite success, ” and has been given permanent status by the school’s curriculum committee.
The USC course is a deviation from past practice in IP education. Up to now, IP had been taught primarily only at the graduate level in law schools or the occasional business school seminar. But as the knowledge economy gained strength in recent decades, IP-protected innovation supplanted industrial might to become the principal driver of corporate value and national economic growing. This, in turn, transformed IP from a narrowly specialized legal battleground into a major force in American social and economic life, affecting realms as varied as business, science, the arts and professions, and even trade policy debates in the auditoriums of Congress.
As a ensue, argues USC President Nikias, “Any young person who takes the opportunity to learn the basics of intellectual property today knows where to find herself with a major advantage in the world of tomorrow.”
Nikias says USC is attempting to fill an “IP education gap” that poses a threat to US leadership of the 21 st century economy. To understand why, he asks us to suppose how US leadership of the industrial economy 100 years ago would have been hamstrung had there been no Wharton School or Penn State — the latter of which established the nation’s first department of industrial and manufacturing engineering in 1908 — to teach mass-production managers to early-2 0th-century business leaders.
Similar stakes exist today, Nikias belief. As Dauchot told students on the first day of class, “We are part of a first-of-a-kind experimentation here. No one has done this before. But IP has become so important in today’s world that no matter what career you choose later on, it is essential that you learn something about intellectual property and how it works.”
Put another way, just as tech literacy was once a requirement only for IT experts but is now considered almost as essential as verbal literacy, IP literacy is not just for lawyers anymore.
All of which calls to thinker that scene from the 1967 movie The Graduate, when Mr. McGuire( Walter Brooke) offers career advice to a young Benjamin Braddock( Dustin Hoffman )?
“Plastics! ” he says. “There’s a great future in plastics.”
Half a century later, USC is demonstrating that intellectual property has become the new motto for almost any job of the future.
Protecting the Jewels
A conflict over the US intellectual-property rights to the Crispr gene-editing tool has spawned uncertainty.
The high-profile court case between Waymo and Uber over self-driving vehicle engineering is basically about ownership of intellectual property rights.
Patents may prove valuable to the nation’s expanding legal marijuanas industry.
from
https://bestmovies.fun/2018/01/22/every-college-students-dream-an-8-am-class-on-patents/
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