The Innovation and Technology Support Office (ITSO), through its Manager, Assoc. Prof. Michael Jorge Peralta, MS, MSPT, Ll. M., conducted symposia about the Fundamentals of Intellectual Property to the senior Industrial Design students of the College of Fine Arts and Design (CFAD) and to the senior Chemical Engineering students from Faculty of Engineering, on February 2 and 15, 2019 respectively.
The objectives of the activity were: to improve IP awareness among the students who are in their thesis year; and to capacitate them to perform simple patent search for their research projects. Peralta gave the definitions and the characteristics of the different IP rights and how they are applied to their respective fields. Then, he oriented them on the different free search engines that can be used in conducting patent search to determine the novelty and inventive step of their projects, to help them to avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel’ and thus make their projects fall within patentable subject matter. He also touched on technology transfer, where their projects can be presented to industry, who can adopt their technologies and ensure their innovations can be used by the public.
One of the objectives of the ITSO is to improve IP awareness sharing their expertise and train faculty, students, and researchers in matters of IP, patent searching, and patent drafting. This will eventually lead to more technologies that will be commercialized and transferred to industry partners for public use and at the same time may earn royalties to the inventors as their incentives to create more.
