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Are business, engineering, and law students learning anything about managing IP? This was the central question asked at a conference last week on Intellectual Property Management Education and Research hosted by WIPO. The answer to this questions appears to be “no”, and the consensus among participants is that this needs to change. Mr. Yo Takagi, in opening the conference said this, “Intellectual property management is the need of the hour and has a major role to play in transforming the vast development and competitive potential and value created by innovation and brand into concrete and tangible benefits for countries and companies.”

As a recent graduate of a major MBA Program, I can confirm that, not only is IP management not on the menu, it isn’t even understood among the faculty exactly what it is or why it is important to business. Naturally, there is an elective course on business law that contains a short segment (1 day I think) on patents and other IP. One of the innovation courses covered it in half a lecture. I know some schools even bring in a law professor to teach an entire course on IP. But obviously none of these has anything to do with teaching students about the importance of managing IP as a core business process.

I find it difficult to understand how IP management hasn’t become an integral part of every business strategy course, much less all of those courses on innovation and entrepreneurship that are now so popular at business schools and executive education programs. They should all be dealing with IP management as a central issue. In support of this modest proposal, I offer three very simple arguments:

1. IP is now the most valuable business asset class in the world

How is it possible that the world’s most valuable business assets receive virtually no attention in an entire MBA education?

It is astonishing that we are not talking to students about how to manage these assets, especially in light of the many, shall we say, more esoteric management subjects that receive in-depth treatment. I remember one experience in particular that illustrates this…  We were studying a specific drug market in a business economics course and the professor was engaging in his best statistical gymnastics to explain why successive waves of drugs had succeeded each other in dominating the market over a period of 40 years. Afterwards, I approached the professor and explained that specific patents and their invalidations and expirations was actually the true explanation. He was quite surprised at this as he was to learn that patents expire and that this can have a significant market impact.

2. IP is a strategic pillar of most of the companies that business students study

How can we study companies that rely on IP, and whose valuations are based mostly on IP, without ever mentioning IP?

Business students are required to delve into virtually every dark corner of dozens of different companies including their history, balance sheets, management, strategy, and finances. The goal is understanding what makes these companies succeed, fail, or otherwise. The irony is that, even though many or most of these companies have leveraged IP as a key part of their strategy or rely on it for their success, this fact never arises in business cases. It is easy to simply say that managing IP must be contained in Porter’s “five forces” - probably under “barriers to entry”. But, this is hardly the same thing as learning how to manage IP.

3. Managing IP is what’s next

Innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship have been the hot topics at business schools around the world for the past 10 years - minus the management of IP.

It would seem unlikely that the management of IP would not be among the most important subjects to address in an innovation and entrepreneurship curriculum. But, I took every possible course on these at what is arguably the best school in the world for these topics, and I can assure you that it is conspicuous in its absence. In theory at least, the top business schools are at the leading edge of management. These are the platforms on which you can gain a view of the road ahead - to see where business is going next. Unfortunately this is not the case for IP management. No only are they not making it a core part of their curriculum to prepare students to integrate IP management into their strategic and operational thinking, they were not  looking ahead five or ten years ago to the explosion of business investment and interest in IP that we are now experiencing.

Ultimately, the most important obstacle to integrating IP management into business curriculums is finding people who know something about it and can teach it. The worst thing that can happen would be for business schools to start putting IP management in the curriculum now - without any real expertise in the subject. This is of course normally what b-schools do. When entrepreneurship was hot - they added it (but not the people who knew anything about it). The result was that many existing professors suddenly became experts in the subject. The truth is that courses nominally about entrepreneurship are really about raising venture capital and worshiping sexy technology.

What the world’s universities need isn’t classes about managing IP. What is needed most are business professors in every subject who are aware of the importance and role of IP in business. Only then will students be exposed to the reality of IP as a key aspect of management and begin to see how it is integral to strategy, competition, financing, partnerships, employment, innovation and, well… business.

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