Individuals and organizations can capitalize on opportunities presented by accelerating developments in the knowledge economy if they increase their intellectual property competence. Governments have begun to promote school-level intellectual property education, hoping to minimize the pernicious traffic in counterfeit electronic leisure products and inculcate in young people respect for the awesome power of the computer to copy, adapt and distribute materials. Engineers work with ideas, which they translate into concrete solutions. Their innovative solutions are frequently useful and commercially valuable, but only if someone has identified and protected them as intellectual property. Professional bodies are beginning to acknowledge the importance of intellectual property competence as an enterprise skill for new graduates. Universities must rethink undergraduate curricula to enhance students’ entrepreneurial skills and widen participation. Self-managed learning activities work with assessment strategies to achieve new independent learning outcomes. At the same time, university research strategies must take account of the growing fuzziness of disciplinary boundaries. Faculties are expected to deliver to new agendas, despite shrinking resources and an overcrowded syllabus. This is an interesting moment at which to consider how undergraduates in non-law disciplines can enjoy an opportunity to learn about intellectual property rights.

IPRs and innovators

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are the response of national and international legal regimes to translate intangible new, original, innovative ideas and creations into marketable commodities. Increasingly students expect to study and pursue their careers in an international community, and on graduation they need to be equipped with an awareness of the implications of trading beyond their native shores. Owning intellectual property implies positive and negative rights. IPRs offer an incentive to be inventive and creative, providing rights owners with an exclusive right for a limited period to market goods and services. PRs are key intangible assets of public and private enterprises, but they can present controversial ethical issues – for example, they underpin music companies ‘expectations of income generation while at the same time threatening music listeners’ expectations of listening to music for free. Professor James Boyle, speaking in March 2003, said: We need to bring together the programmers and the web publishers, design artists and the film makers and the people who are computer scientists and the 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. There’s no single strategy, we should substantially change the way we look at intellectual property. (Boyle, 2003.) Kaplan and Kaplan, US patent attorneys and academics who include intellectual property in their university engineering classes, suggest that: IP knowledge is important for engineers: engineers should try to understand IP basics to protect their creations. Also, IP searches can indicate the growth of different engineering fields. Furthermore, the proper use of IP promotes the progress of a field. Engineers should become familiar with the basics of the three traditional IP areas: copyrights, trademarks and patents. They should know which IP rights are needed to protect their creations. All of the students have reported that they enjoyed the information and will use the material in the future. The best result came well after the completion of the course. MS W returned to thank the professor. Apparently, she impressed an interviewer with her knowledge of IP and received an engineering position because of it! (Kaplan and Kaplan, 2003.) Yo Takagi, Executive Director of the World Intellectual Property Organization, said: In view of the expanded role of IP in knowledge-based economies and societies, it is increasingly important to teach IP to students who do not have a legal background. (Takagi,2004.) IPRs pose challenges, risks and benefits to any operation. If IP is to deliver its true worth to an organization, the value of IPRs needs to be understood in many different contexts, including buying, selling and investment (see Figures 1 and 2). Most companies will not now undertake a new venture without a thorough analytical IP plan. In the commercial and business world, the development of new tactics and strategies for the deployment of intellectual property rights to commercial advantage has been identified as the next corporate challenge on the battlefields of the knowledge economy (Rivette and Kline, 2000). Take the example of IBM: its patent portfolio gives the company the freedom to do what it needs to do through cross licensing. It gives it access to the inventions of others that are critical to rapid innovation. Access is far more valuable to IBM than the fees it earns from its thousands of active patents – about $2 billion per year (Bessen, 2003). Survey evidence finds that many other firms obtain patents in order to ‘block competitors. Some firms, rather than licensing carefully chosen individual patents, interact over entire portfolios. Firms in the semiconductor, electronics and computer sectors license entire portfolios for a technology field, including patents for which they have not yet filed applications. Baumol (2004) divides inventions into two polar categories: revolutionary breakthroughs and cumulative incremental improvements. Most inventions are somewhere in between. Research by the US Small Business Administration supports that idea: it found that. . . most of the revolutionary new ideas of the past two centuries have been – and are likely to continue to be –provided more heavily by independent innovators who essentially operate small business enterprises. (SBA, 2003.) Baumol (2004) suggests that large companies will tend to specialize in incremental improvements to avoid the risks of the unknown that the revolutionary breakthrough entails. Revolutionary breakthrough is most often left to the small or newly founded enterprise, which is unlikely to enjoy the benefit of in house IPR professionals. Since an engineer from her or his first day at work may be required to sign agreements concerning disclosure, development and ownership of IPRs, it is important to hit the ground running. Engineers are exposed to and create a company’s proprietary and confidential information. They need to be aware of the risks and obligations in using someone else’s proprietary IP. IPRs can affect engineers in all aspects of professional development, whether they are employees or running their own business. Research has shown that in the UK as a whole there is poor engagement with the patent system, especially among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)(Intellectual Property Initiative, 1998). This is not good for UK plc’s bottom line. A common perception of the patent system is that it is slow, uncertain and expensive– there can be a gap of 4.5 years between filing a patent application and receiving the patent grant. A granted patent can be revoked if it does not survive a challenge to its validity. And maintaining an international patent over 20 years could cost $250,000. None of these negatives, however, justifies excluding the subject of IPRs from the undergraduate curriculum.

School-based IP education

Increasingly students starting their undergraduate studies will have been introduced to intellectual property concepts during their time at school. One impetus behind the introduction of the subject has been a growing awareness of the dangers posed to society through the purchase of counterfeit CD-ROMs and DVDs (Lakhan, 2002) and of the risks associated with computer copying.1 Many national Patent Offices, having recognized that school children are a vulnerable and captive audience, are working on ways to make them IP-aware. The Australian government’s IP Australia Innovated is such a resource. The UK Patent Office introduced its ‘Think Kit’with great success. Within a few months of its releasein March 2003 it was taken up by 51% of schools. It isenvisaged that it will contribute to the delivery of thenational citizenship curriculum. Development of the‘Think Kit’ could be linked to the European Union’sintellectual property enforcement directive, which in itsearlier versions4 looked set to require member states toencourage IP awareness campaigns to educate thepublic on the risks and problems associated with piracy,counterfeiting, rights and obligations linked to onlinecontent usage and infringement.5 The proposeddirective drew harsh criticism on the basis that it couldrestrict civil liberties and impose sanctions. The finalversion of the directive6 refers to publication ofintellectual property infringement decisions as a usefulcontribution to public awareness,7 although it hasdropped specific reference to education.A second influence on school-level IP education isthe increase in emphasis placed on technology, designand enterprise studies. In Japan, intellectual propertyeducation in schools is emphasized because ‘knowledgeabout the protection and utilization of intellectualproperty rights is important to every citizen in order toensure that Japan establishes for the 21st century asociety based on creative science and technology’(Japan Patent Office, 2001). The Japanese Patent Officesets out a programme that will include teachereducation and the production of appropriately engagingfree-of-charge IPR text books, as well as promotinginvention through public libraries and museums.Even those students who have not been introducedto IP concepts at school are aware of IPRs. They areactively engaged in downloading and sharing musicfiles; they proudly display rip-off designer-labelgarments. It is difficult to escape discussion ofcopyright infringements in, for example, Harry Potterderivatives. There is growing publicity about theexploitative practices involved in producing designerlabelsportswear. Thoughtful students may be engagedin campaigns to make patented pharmaceuticals morefreely available to treat disease in the poorer countriesor against genetic modification in crops and animals.

Why is it so difficult to include IP in the curriculum?

School-based IP education initiatives are commendable and are to be encouraged, but they do not address the need to provide a basic competence in IPRs to graduates, especially those embarking on careers that will involve the creation and use of intellectual property. Professor Bill Hennessey (1999), writing at the Franklin Pierce Law School, suggests that there are three barriers to the inclusion of IPR in the non-law curriculum:

• the engineering curriculum at most engineering and technical institutes is very concentrated and focused on acquisition of the knowledge and professional skills students need to become licensed engineers;
• professional engineering organizations do not require an understanding of intellectual property as an area of knowledge within the engineering discipline; and
• there is a lack of faculty members who are qualified to teach the subject.

This last point is supported by research undertaken at Curtin University (de la Harpe et al, 2000), where staff responses to requests to teach non-core professional skills included:

• ‘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.

The students, however, do not present a barrier. Once they understand the link between IPRs and commercial exploitation, they respond positively to intellectual property classes, particularly when the examples and case studies used relate to their own practice (Kaplan and Kaplan, 2003; Soetendorp, 2002).

The UK Engineering Council has recently published UK-SPEC, which details the standards for registration as a Chartered Engineer.8 For the first time these include the expectation that engineers, engaged in the creative and innovative development of engineering technology and continuous improvement systems, will have the ability to secure the necessary intellectual property rights.9 Expecting graduates to wait until they start theircareers to learn about how IPRs operate in the workplace leaves them vulnerable

Using transdisciplinary to promote IPR education

The final section of this paper suggests some ways in which intellectual property academics might collaborate across faculties to generate opportunities for cross disciplinary teaching, research and consultancy. Internationally, governments’ higher education agendas are bringing radical changes to universities. These changes are having a significant impact on traditional approaches to academic research. The classical or liberal model of the university, which was based on the transmission of a received body of knowledge from teacher to student is disappearing. ‘Massification and democratization mean that universities are no longer so intimately associated with the production of scientific and professional elites’ These significant changes offer opportunities to forge collaborative cross-faculty partnerships which could undertake applied industry-oriented research that would produce transdisciplinary knowledge.

In the context of intellectual property, if IP academics could appreciate the value of sharing their subject with non-lawyers, and engineers would welcome the inclusion of IPR competence in their syllabus, there would be benefit to both disciplines:

• Engineers would know how to build safe bridges and how to exploit their innovative techniques of building bridges safely.
• Lawyers would have a clearer understanding of how the law impacts on their clients’ business interests.
• Law and engineering academics would be able to develop opportunities, separately and together, to conduct transdisciplinary research and pursue knowledge transfer opportunities that would enrich their teaching.

Simulating inter-professional encounters in the real or virtual classroom would enhance the professional practice of the participants. Such encounters help break down the walls between traditional, highly specialized functions and lead to more fluid forms. This is happening with increasing frequency in the world of work: research and development alliances in large global enterprises can involve engineers working with different professions, each bringing its own expertise to complex problem-solving. But the blurring of disciplinary boundaries is happening very slowly in universities Dr Theodore Zeldin is a contemporary philosopher and historian, who researches interdisciplinary relations at work. He asked an engineer how long it would take to teach him to be an engineer. ‘Three months’ was the reply – not to be a real engineer, but to understand engineers’ language and their problems, to learn the essence of the way they think. He suggests that the term ‘social exclusion’ includes all those whose mind-set is confined to a single profession, and asks ‘what new kind of education or training will not just slot students into pigeon hole careers?’ Employers want flexible, multi-skilled graduates who are open to learning and equipped to respond to the rapidly changing nature of the workplace. Students do not have a problem with that. It is not easy to set up transdisciplinary institutional structures in the academic community, where a sense of disciplinary identity is the norm. Engineers must be able to design a bridge that will not collapse, lawyers must have legal skills. But graduates in each discipline also need the capacity to cooperate with experts from other fields, to see problems in a complementary way. It is necessary to find a balance, to promote and manage both sets of abilities Intellectual property has traditionally been taught as a law subject to law students in law faculties. Suggesting that intellectual property should constitute a transdisciplinary element of a science or technology programme challenges the concept that it has to be taught by lawyers.

Conclusions

If a young engineer comes into contact with patent information at a very early stage, during his training if possible, he will use this source of information regularly since he will already be familiar with it.

Non-law students do not expect to become IPR experts, but they do need to know enough about it before graduating to be able to use IP resources in the future and to feel confident that they know

• where to find patent information;
• when it is time to call in an expert; and
• how to commence the dialogue with a professional intellectual property adviser.

Of all the academic disciplines, engineering may encompass most of the patentable breakthroughs, yet some engineering students are never exposed to IP education. If taught early, starting in the freshman year, and often, throughout the undergraduate education, IP education will be ingrained into the students’ creative thought process. It will also give the undergraduate engineering student other options upon graduation, perhaps to study patent law or technology transfer. Change in the knowledge economy is rapid for both students and academics. The ‘threat’ to non-law academics of having to include intellectual property awareness in the curriculum should be seen as an ‘opportunity’ to engage with a vital topic that links commercial, legal and technical disciplines. At Tokyo Metropolitan University, I was invited to give a lecture to second-year mechanical engineering students to introduce them to IPRs. The students reported back to their Dean: Intellectual property rights – it’s like food for engineers, they should have a little every day.