Intellectual property for engineers: a curriculum development project

Ruth Soetendorp, Bournemouth University

The current growth in public legal education will have a double impact on law schools, increasing the number of law school academics reappraising how they facilitate learning law and increasing the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative legal research.

These ideas form the backdrop to the UKCLE funded Law and engineers project led by Ruth, which is concentrating on ways in which intellectual property law can be integrated into the undergraduate engineering syllabus. This paper presents the research to date, and its anticipated outcomes.

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Legal education involves more than educating legal professionals, since law teachers should be recognised as ‘professional’ (Burridge et al, 2002), rather than ‘purely legal’, educators. Public legal education is growing, ensuring that “individuals as citizens and consumers are in a position to enforce their rights and discharge their responsibilities, and to use legal services to their advantage” (Brooker, 2004). This growth will have a double impact on law schools, increasing the number of law school academics reappraising how they facilitate learning law and increasing the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative legal research.

These ideas form the backdrop to the UKCLE funded Law and engineers project currently being undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of four, from law faculties and engineering faculties in two universities. We are focusing on the ways in which intellectual property law can be integrated into the undergraduate engineering syllabus.

Why intellectual property law (IPR)? Why engineers? Successful management of IPR has been identified nationally, by the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship among others, as a key enterprise skill. The UK Engineering Council expects accredited members to have an awareness of IPR management. We are researching two aspects of current practice; first, the extent to which intellectual property law academics are involved in collaborative teaching and research with non-law faculties, and secondly the extent to which engineering faculties offer their students intellectual property legal education, and where they do, who is teaching it?

We anticipate beneficial outcomes for law academics teaching beyond the law school, and for other faculties attempting to integrate law and other non-core subjects into their syllabus. This paper presents our research to date, and its anticipated outcomes.

In 2004 a unique proposal was made simultaneously to the Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre and to UKCLE. It described a research project that would be led by a small team comprising two IP law academics and two engineering academics. The primary aim of the project is to develop a pedagogy, supported by a Web-based resource, to facilitate the integration of intellectual property law into the engineering syllabus. More broadly, outcomes should benefit lawyers teaching law to students of non-law disciplines and assist the integration of non-core topics into a core curriculum. The proposal was recognised by small project grants from both subject centres, and began its work in summer 2005.

Intellectual property (IP) is a comparative newcomer to the range of subjects offered by UK law schools. From a position in which it was regarded as at best a possible area for research and a strand in the teaching of the LLM course of the University of London, it has, very shortly, assumed full acceptance. A majority of higher education institutions have at least one academic with a declared interest in intellectual property, and the subject now forms a component part of law degree programmes in the UK (Booton & Prime, 2002).

Things have moved on swiftly as a result of the exposure intellectual property has received in national and European policy. UK government Higher Education Innovation Fund programmes 1, 2 and currently 3 have each highlighted the importance of managing university generated intellectual property. In 1998 the DTI and the DfEE united to “reach out to business” (HEFCE, 2000 at Annex A), and Vice Chancellors were tasked with putting IP policies in place by 2001. As a result technology transfer offices now exist in most if not all higher education institutions, and intellectual property is lodged firmly in the higher education psyche.

One result has been that disciplines other than law have begun to be curious about intellectual property. They see that whilst IP has its roots in the law its branches may well touch aspects of their own discipline and be relevant to their students’ studies and future careers. This has stimulated consideration of how intellectual property should be taught beyond the law school (Soetendorp, 2005b). This in turn has led to research into how curricula can be designed to accommodate such developments in faculties as diverse as humanities, science and technology, and the creative arts (MacLaughlan et al, 2005).

Curriculum development

Pressure to keep curriculum development as a standard item on the agenda of all university boards and their faculties comes from many different sources (Gruba, 2004):

• competition in the market for home and overseas students
• response to government expectations
• emergence of new technologies
• employers, professional bodies and accrediting institutions
• industry and the professions

At the same time, the following factors within an institution or academic group also play a significant role in influencing change:

• individuals with strong leadership skills
• financial pressures
• academic fashion, academic attitudes

The intellectual property law curriculum in law schools is in a constant state of development, given the continuing growth of national and international intellectual property law. In the area of intellectual property education, the pressure for curriculum change comes from a similar range of stakeholders, and similar circumstances. But it is important from an early stage in any discussion of curriculum change in the area of intellectual property to be prepared to consider the subject both as a law discipline subject and as an interdisciplinary subject.

Law schools are looking to design intellectual property programmes that are relevant to business, the creative industries and science and technology. At the same time, faculties of diverse disciplines including business, chemistry, engineering, bioscience, medicine, arts and humanities are themselves beginning to appreciate that intellectual property should feature on their curricula. Some are beginning to develop intellectual property programmes, with or without law school involvement.

Curriculum development in the law school

Intellectual property studies are usually offered in the final year of undergraduate law degrees. By that time students will have studied contract and other foundation law subjects which form a good underpinning to intellectual property studies. It is unusual for an undergraduate programme to cover all the different aspects of intellectual property represented in the graphic below.

Most undergraduate programmes cover copyrights and patents, then trade marks. Least likely to be included is design law. Copyrights tend to have most time allocated, whereas quasi rights, including confidentiality and know how, have least. Geographical indications is one new area which law school programmes would most want to include, if there were more time. All law schools face decisions about what to include or leave out of the expanding menu of IPRs.

Growth of law school IP syllabus:

• substantive national law
• substantive international law
• trade secrets and confidentiality
• human resource issues
• competition law
• commercial exploitation – law and practice
• management and strategy
• national and international policy
• ethics
• alternative regimes
• and more…

One of the factors influencing curriculum change in this area should be the future range of careers opening to graduates (see Hennessey, 2004). It is important that curricula remain responsive to the demands of employers and professional accreditation bodies. At the same time, the study of intellectual property law in the law school is an academic study. Space should be found to introduce students to criticality as well as to developing a vocational skill. Studying intellectual property law brings the student into contact with deep moral, philosophical and ethical issues, which raise questions about the nature of property itself. Critical approaches to intellectual property education should include examination of the fact that patents often go unused and are an inappropriate form of protection. The ideas that govern the open source software and GNU public licence and Creative Commons licences are insufficiently researched at university or understood in the workplace.

The curriculum is delivered via the ‘programme’, which comprises ‘units’ or ‘modules’, each of which must satisfy university and independent sector criteria, such as those set by the Quality Assurance Agency. Programmes and units must identify aims, objectives and independent learning outcomes, which are delivered via learning and teaching methodologies, including assessments. The combination of independent learning outcomes and assessments is key to ensuring delivery of the curriculum.

Innovative assessments

Assessments can be designed to allow law school students to expand and test their knowledge at the same time. At Bournemouth University the LLB (Hons) students have the option to study Intellectual Property Practice (IPP) as a unit at Level H. Two innovative assessments provide evidence that the student has achieved the independent learning objectives set for the course, which are set out below.

Having completed this unit the student will be able to:

1. Diagnose an innovative work and identify the potential intellectual property rights.
2. Relate the steps to successful recognition and protection of intellectual property rights.
3. Evaluate the mechanisms for successful commercial exploitation of intellectual property rights.
4. Appraise critique of intellectual property regimes.

Assessment 1: The Advice Letter

IPP students write one assignment as an IP Adviser to a student ‘client’ from Design Engineering. The IPP students must advise the design engineers on the intellectual property potential of their final year projects. The assignment tests the IPP students’ ability to identify appropriate advice and apply it.

Whilst the text of the advice letter must be intelligible to the design engineer, the IP student is expected to submit a full appendix of the legal authority on which the advice has been based. The exercise has benefits for both groups of students in enhancing graduate employability skills. The IP lawyers get clinical experience of drafting advice. The design engineers receive intellectual property information they would not otherwise have had, as well as receiving clinical experience of presenting their ideas in dialogue with a professional adviser. (This assignment also helps reduce plagiarism, because the advice has to be tailored to the client’s needs.)

Assessment 2: IP Issues

Because the syllabus is so crowded there is little time to focus on the policy issues affecting different intellectual property regimes. The IPP students are asked to select an ‘intellectual property issue’ to research as a small group during the course of the programme, and to write up their research as an examination question in the summer exam. Students have chosen issues such as patenting pharmaceuticals for use in combating disease in developing countries, patenting gene therapies, protecting television programme formats, and protecting and exploiting traditional knowledge.

Before the exams the student groups make informal presentations to the class on their research. This provides an opportunity for the students to engage in critical thinking and writing and to be up to date on a set of leading edge intellectual property topics, as well as to have something interesting to say on their subject at interviews!

The UK Joint Education Board of the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents and the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys has begun to widen the very small number of institutions granting exemptions from the foundation stage of their professional examinations. Students completing an approved undergraduate or postgraduate programme at Bournemouth, such as the Intellectual Property Practice (IPP) unit described above, enjoy these exemptions from summer 2005.

Interdisciplinary collaboration influencing curriculum development

One of the newest catalysts for curriculum development is the increase in interdisciplinary collaborative teaching and research that takes place between law schools and other faculties, the subject of an invited paper delivered by the author to a World Intellectual Property Organisation symposium (Soetendorp, 2005a). Interfaculty work presents challenges and difficulties to academics and management. There is nevertheless a growing body of evidence that, in respect of intellectual property in particular, it is a fertile ground for producing research, knowledge transfer and learning and teaching outputs.

The Institute of Automotive Studies at Oxford University’s Begbroke Science Park provides a focal point for the university’s research and development in partnership with industry. One case study is the SPRINTcar (Short Production Run Innovative Technology Car) which “will deliver collaborative intellectual property and new opportunities for UK business”. Management and marketing process, design and embodiment processes, and intellectual property issues and commercialisation processes are expected to form MBA and PhD projects.

Curriculum development beyond the law school

Academics from other disciplines are beginning to realise that their students’ employability and enterprise skills would benefit from an awareness of intellectual property concepts. In science, technology, creative and business faculties there is growing recognition of the importance of students being aware of protecting, exploiting and enforcing intellectual property rights. At the same time professional bodies, governmental and international institutions are promoting the importance of developing intellectual property learning opportunities in the workplace, as part of lifelong learning and continuous professional development.

Addressing the Royal Society of Arts in London (2003) the internationally renowned intellectual property law academic James Boyle said:

We need to bring together the programmers and the Web publishers, the design artists and the film makers, and the people who are computer scientists and entrepreneurs and say “intellectual property is affecting you and you ought to be thinking about how it’s affecting you”. This is something in which we have to educate people.

Non-law academics have not always been enthusiastic about introducing intellectual property to the curriculum. Asked in 2003 whether they would teach intellectual property concepts to their students, engineering academics responded on a personal level:

• I shouldn’t have to teach this
• I don’t know how to teach this
• if we had decent students in the first place I wouldn’t need to teach this

Objectively, they were reluctant because:

• the syllabus is too crowded
• intellectual property is not an explicit benchmark or accreditation requirement (see the Engineering Council UK accreditation requirements [PDF])

Additional reasons for their lack of enthusiasm included (Soetendorp, 2002):

• it is no one person’s responsibility
• it would be seen as ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’ engineering
• awareness is not there yet
• it is a subject that ought to be taught by experts
• there are more important things engineers need to think about, for example safety

Engineering students, on the other hand, have responded positively to intellectual property as something relevant to their future careers. One Japanese engineering undergraduate commented after an introductory intellectual property session: “Intellectual property is like food for engineers. They should have a little every day”. However, research undertaken at MIT (Sawhney, 2004) revealed that science students did not always put a value on patenting. Sawhney discusses the fear scientists experience regarding misappropriation of their ideas. These may be alleviated by the publication of research abstracts that allow them to “stake a claim on research in progress, rather than patent applications which provide a form of exclusivity which would be inconsistent with the informal norms of the community”.

Intellectual property education is unlikely to succeed if it is externally imposed on a faculty. Rather, work needs to be done to enable non-law faculties to open up their curricula to intellectual property and support its delivery to their students.

Intellectual property education has a particularly important role to play by supporting engineers in the creation of product or process development opportunities that have a unique and defensible IP. This is the fundamental basis upon which further entrepreneurial activity can be based. However there is no well established pedagogy for educating engineers and scientists about intellectual property.

— (MacLaughlan, 2005)

Intellectual property in the engineering syllabus: a work in progress

In preparation for the first workshop of the Law and engineers project in October 2005 a small group of UK and Australian engineering professors were surveyed about the extent of intellectual property teaching in their faculties. The questions and responses l have been added to the project website.

Responses included (Soetendorp, 2005a):

• IP is integrated into activities covered by the Knowledge Transfer Centre, it doesn’t feature in the curriculum, it isn’t assessed
• guest speakers provide some guest lectures on some courses
• IP is embedded in taught units and is assessed as part of an overall project where students have to write a business plan and address the issue of IP
• touched upon in several subjects, taught by an engineer, sometimes with an IP academic from the law faculty
• it is present but not well developed in 4th year Management; we want to develop a stronger IP presence
• it is taught by an engineer as a separate part of a discrete final year business management unit

Workshop participants were a mixed group comprising intellectual property academics, engineering academics, business people and representatives from the UK Patent Office, the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship. They met to explore ways in which to progress the inclusion of intellectual property in the engineering curriculum, particularly given the current emphasis on graduate enterprise skills. The workshop participants agreed that their findings would be broadly relevant to other non-law science and technology disciplines, as well as to other innovative and creative industries. Key questions discussed were:

• who best to teach intellectual property to engineers?
• what does a graduating engineer need in their ‘IP toolbox’?
• what should be the intellectual property learning outcomes for engineers?

Most importantly, participants identified the need to find a common language that would enable academics and students from either Law or Engineering sufficiently to understand the meaning of concepts which are significant in each others’ disciplines to permit meaningful dialogue

— (Zeldin, 1998:50-66).

The project is currently in the process of identifying learning and teaching materials to post on the websites of the two subject centres.

Continuing professional development and lifelong learning

Once at work the student is more likely to be drawn more towards ‘vocational’ or ‘pragmatic’ training outcomes, rather than ‘academic’ consideration of the subject. Nevertheless, the range of intellectual property education topics in the work context can be wide. Interests will include the practical aspects of recognition, protection, exploitation and enforcement of rights; human resource issues; strategic issues; and national and international issues. There have been responses from industry to the needs of people already in work wanting to understand more about intellectual property.

Phillips of Eindhoven, which has factories in China, has set up intellectual property academies at three Chinese universities for its staff and other interested parties. Gillette UK plc commissioned an intranet-based interactive programme to introduce all its staff to intellectual property concepts. Their responses have been the creation, by private and public sector institutions, of ‘free at the point of consumption’ learning resources:

• the WIPO World Wide Academy has a comprehensive Web-based provision suitable for use by the casual enquirer as well as by the serious student
• the European Patent Academy, a new development of the European Patent Office, has the goals of “supporting and developing innovation in Europe by promoting and participating in training projects designed for industry and patent system users in the areas of creation, strategy, evaluation and management”
• the European Commission, through Framework Funding initiatives, has supported a number of initiatives, some of which are free to use, for example the IP Europe Project, aimed at inventors and small and medium sized enterprises

Another resource is the DIPS platform (Distance learning approach applied to enhance introduction of Intellectual Property rights in management strategies of enterprises). This resource has been designed by 12 European partners, and is divided into three modules:

1. Intellectual property rights.
2. Intellectual property rights as a source of information.
3. Valuation and exploitation.

It is suitable for use by individual managers and companies in the workplace, as well as by universities, technical and research institutes as part of accredited programmes.

The UK’s IP Awareness Network has begun compiling a database of intellectual property education sources which are available online and free to use.

Conclusion

Intellectual property education is rising faster and higher on government agendas due, not least, to concerns about intellectual property enforcement. (See COM 46 final 2003/0024 (COD)). Intellectual property academics in law schools are beginning to appreciate the benefits of research collaboration across disciplines, with spin-offs in enhanced knowledge transfer activity and teaching.

Academics in non-law disciplines are beginning to appreciate the benefits of exposing students and faculty to intellectual property concepts. Integrating cognitively disparate topics into the syllabus means developing new learning and teaching strategies and methods. It requires lawyers teaching non-lawyers to create in students an organic awareness of essential legal knowledge or specific values. Non-law academics must start the process of integrating law into their curriculum by recognising its relevance to their students. Hopefully, the outcomes of the intellectual property in the engineering syllabus project will make the process easier and more satisfying for academics from law, engineering and other disciplines, and for their students.

References

• Booton & Prime (2002) [unpublished]
• Brooker S (2004) Public legal education: comments by the National Consumer Council on the Advice Services Alliance, Citizenship Foundation and Legal Action Group discussion paper on a national strategy for public legal education London: National Consumer Council
• Burridge R et al (2002) Effective learning and teaching in law London: Routledge
• Gruba P et al (2004) ‘What drives curriculum change?’ in R Lister and A Young (eds) Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology (6th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2004), Dunedin, New Zealand)
• HEFCE (2000) Higher Education Reach-out to Business and the Community Fund: Second invitation to apply for special funding (Invitation 00/05) Bristol: HEFCE
• Hennessey W (2004) Intellectual property program of the Franklin Pierce Law Centre: past developments, current situation and future tasks, with particular emphasis on ITS education methodology to develop human resources meeting social needs (ICS Seminar, February)
• MacLaughlan R et al (2005) Engineering enterprise through IP education: what is needed? (Proceedings of the 2005 ASEE/AaeE 4th Global Colloquium on Engineering Education)
• Sawhney N (2002) The sociological nature of intellectual property rights emerging from open collaborative design in university settings: preliminary analysis of student projects in MIT design studios (working paper as part of PhD thesis)
• Soetendorp R (2005a) Collaboration in intellectual property education and research (WIPO International Symposium on Intellectual Property (IP) Education and Research, Geneva, 30 June and 1 July)
• Soetendorp R (2005b) ‘Intellectual property education: in the law school and beyond’ Intellectual Property Quarterly
• Soetendorp R (2002) ‘Intellectual property rights awareness: a business enterprise skill for engineering education’ (Australasian Association for Engineering Education 13th Annual Conference, Canberra)
• Zeldin T (1998) Conversation London: Harvill

Biography of Ruth Soetendorp

Ruth specialises in intellectual property and its management. She is primarily a teacher, at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the School of Finance and Law and also more widely within Bournemouth University.

Ruth has presented papers at a number of international patent gatherings and to educational conferences. She has led workshops for UKCLE, RAGnet and the Learning and Teaching Support Network. She publishes on the scholarship of teaching and learning, in particular of law in non-law disciplines. She is widely published and also active in intellectual property related research.

In July 2001 Ruth received a National Teaching Fellowship. She is also working on the UKCLE funded Law and engineers project to develop a pedagogy for the delivery of intellectual property law in the engineering curriculum.

Last Modified: 12 July 2010