Fostering Innovation Through IP Education: Critical Implications from Business School’s experiment

Abstract

Intellectual property (IP) is increasingly regarded as the most important asset of technology ventures amidst knowledge-intensive competition. In Thailand, lessons regarding intellectual property are mainly thought in law schools from perspectives of lawyers. In contrast, business school students have very little chances of learning fundamental concepts especially the way to accumulate, protect and commercialize company’s intellectual property. In this paper, the author would like to share his pilot experiment of introducing IP knowledge to 2nd year students in BBA coursework. Concepts of copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, and geographical indication were blended in production management class through case study approach. Adopting action research method, students were observed and interviewed in terms of their awareness how they see value in each type of intellectual property. According to the observations and interviews, BBA students tend to acknowledge necessity of accumulating and protecting intellectual property. The perception of intellectual property in their eyes, however, is limited to copyright. This is an early sign that they do not understand yet how each type of intellectual property differs from others. Next, their key interest is to protect first, without clear idea yet how to commercialize intellectual property. This pilot experiment implies that intellectual property education in Thai business schools is weak and remains a critical flaw in the field of technology management especially at the undergraduate level. Further attempts to bridge intellectual property knowledge to other social science fields are needed to foster creativity and innovation.