Universities need to teach business students about patents: a suggested approach
Abstract
An understanding of IP should not be confined to the graduates of law schools. In today's knowledge-based economy, patents often play an important role in business. Yet many students graduate from their management programmes knowing little about intellectual property (IP) in general and patents in particular. Too often managers only learn about patenting when already working for a firm. They learn through trial and error. It is time for business schools to provide integrated, interdisciplinary IP programmes because innovation requires the expertise of a variety of professionals: inventors, business professionals and legal advisors. Innovation is essentially a team activity, demanding that participants understand at least some aspects of each other's expertise, as well as effective communication across areas. While a general IP course could already be offered at the bachelor level, a specialized patent law and strategy course for managers at the master level is a must and not just for those who have opted for technology management. A course that combines patenting theory and the kind of errors so commonly made by managers in practice would be of great value.
Keywords: Management education; Technology and innovation management; Patent law; Patent strategy; Competition tools
Published
Issue
Section
License
EJLT is an open access journal, aiming to disseminate academic work and perspectives as widely as possible to the benefit of the author and the author’s readers. It is the assumption of the EJLT that authors who publish in the journal wish their work to be available as freely and as widely as possible through the open access publishing channel.
Authors who publish with EJLT will retain copyright and moral rights in the underlying work but will grant all users the rights to copy, store and print for non-commercial use copies of their work. Commercial mirroring may also be carried out with the consent of the journal. The work must remain as published – without redaction or editing – and must clearly state the identity of the author and the originating EJLT url of the article. Any commercial use of the author’s work - apart from mirroring - requires the permission of the author and any aspects of the article which are the property of EJLT (e.g. typographical format) requires permission from EJLT.
Authors can sometimes become no longer contactable (through, for example, death or retirement). If this occurs, any rights in the work will pass to the European Journal of Law and Technology which will continue to make the work available in as wide a manner as possible to achieve the aims of open access and ensuring that an author's work continues to be available. An author - or their estate - can recover these rights from EJLT by providing contact information.
The European Journal of Law and Technology holds rights in format, publication and dissemination.
EJLT, as a non-commercial organisation - which receives donations to allow it to continue publishing – must retain information on reader access to journal articles. This means that we will not give permission to mirror the journal unless we can be provided with full details as to reader access to each and every journal article. We prefer and encourage deep linking rather than mirroring. Encouragement is thus given for all users – commercial and non-commercial – to provide indexes and links to articles in the EJLT where the index or link points to the location of the article on the EJLT server, rather than to stored copies on other servers.
Please contact the European Journal of Law and Technology if you are in any doubt as to what this statement of use covers.