Abstract:
There is a widespread movement within tertiary education to build the capacity of
engineering students to engage with enterprise. This is reflected within the accreditation
requirements of professional bodies, stated industry needs, initiatives by government agencies
and the emergence of related curricula content in some engineering courses. Entrepreneurship
education for engineers relies on developing student capabilities in the business and the legal
intellectual property domains as well as their traditional engineering capabilities.
Intellectually Property (IP) education has a particularly important role to play by supporting
engineers in the creation of product or process development opportunities which 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.
The goal of this paper is to explore student and educator beliefs about what engineers need to
know about IP. This work is in part based around the experience of introducing IP education
into engineering subjects. It was found that engineering educators were initially unclear about
exactly which types of IP knowledge and skills were the most important for students to know.
To what extent should the various elements of IP Law, IP valuation and exploitation, IP
Policy, IP Management and IP ethics be emphasized? To what extent is a general grounding
or scaffolding of law needed for engineers to place IP Law and practice in the context of their
engineering activities? Student responses indicated many already had an appreciation of the
engineering process and were seeking an IP perspective on issues. The findings outlined here
show that to meet the needs of engineering faculties and students there will need to be strong
contextualisation of IP education and that engineering educators will also need to engage
with identifying what IP education can offer.
