Intellectual Property and Commercial Relationships Between Academia and Industry

New

This interactive 3 hour workshop, led by Patent Attorneys from Marks & Clerk will be divided into two distinct sessions.

Introduction to Intellectual Property (IP) In this session we provide a presentation on what IP is and the different forms it can come in, giving an overview of patents, designs, trade marks , copyright and trade secrets, explaining what each of these is and how they may be of value. The session then focusses on patents, with information given on the rights conferred by a patent and how someone would obtain a patent for their invention. In particular, we focus on the importance of novelty and inventive step of the claims of a patent application, as well as the importance of data to support your invention and how much data may be considered sufficient. Following this presentation, the students are given an interactive case study to work through in small groups. This case study takes a real world patent that was opposed and asks the students to assess whether patent claims that were filed in an appeal are novel and inventive over three pieces of prior art. This task is talked through thoroughly before students are asked to make a judgment in their groups. Each group will then feedback and we go through what the answer is and why this was interesting, focusing on how the data of the application combined with the prior art show that the invention is plausible.

Commercial Relationships between Academia and Industry In this session an overview of different relationships between academia and industry is given along with some of the benefits and pitfalls of these various relationships. We give an overview of what to look out for with grant funding and the importance of considering the different agendas of the parties involved in collaborative projects. This is followed by discussion of the various compromises that should be considered to maintain positive relationships with collaborators. Towards the end of the session there is discussion on considering the ownership of any results generated in collaborative projects.

BBSRC DTP Students Yr 2-4

Number of sessions: 1