The Innovation and Intellectual Property Management (IIPM) lab together with partners from the IfM Engage (UK), Oxford Brookes University (UK), Indian Institute of Science (India) and Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) (India) recently completed the British Council-funded Going Global India-UK Partnership project, ‘Intellectual Property for Sustainability’. The project designed, developed, and pilot tested a multidisciplinary, post graduate level teaching module that combines IP and Innovation for Sustainability based on learnings from the recently completed IPACST project (www.ip4sustainability.org).
A cohort of 10 India graduate students (five from BITS and five from IISc) participated in the pilot programme. The cohort included students from diverse backgrounds such as science, engineering, design, architecture and management. One of the students commented "The program was truly a unique and enlightening experience that provided me with a deeper understanding of the intersection of these two critical areas." Read the full post here.
More course impressions are available here.
The pilot course started with a face-to-face teaching week in India during mid-December 2022, followed by another face-to-face teaching in Cambridge in January 2023. The course covered a range of topics starting from introduction to sustainability, intellectual property and sustainable innovations, followed by deep dive sessions into patent data analysis, IP licensing, IP valuation and IP strategy for sustainability. A series of industry visits, guest talks, interactive quiz and hands-on exercises complemented the classroom lectures. Along the course, the students explored and evaluated new ways of thinking and responsibly dealing with intellectual property (IP) for creating positive social and environmental impact, through an interim mini-project and a final project. The team would like to thank the guest speakers from industry and academia including Mr Ganesh Shankar (India), Prof Elisabeth Eppinger (Germany), Dr Nigel Clarke (Austria) and Prof Erik G Hansen (Austria) for sharing their valuable knowledge and insights with the students. For industrial visit, the week in India included a visit to Akshaya Patra to learn how their centralised kitchens supply free school meals to millions of school children. To complement the experience, the week in Cambridge included visits to Cambridge Cleantech and Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
During the Cambridge visit, the students also had a chance to meet with a high-level visiting delegation from the Indian government - Dr Srivari Chandrasekhar, Secretary and Sanjeev Varshney, Head of International Cooperation, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Dr. Tata Narasinga Rao, International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials (ARCI), Air Cmde Hirendra Assudani, High Commission of India, London, Sunil Kumar, Senior Science and Technology Advisor, British Deputy High Commission, Bangalore.
The course details including the teaching materials are available upon request to anyone interested in incorporating all or parts of the material into their own course. For enquiries about the course material, contact Prof Frank Tietze, ft263@cam.ac.uk.