[Kip Currier: Money quote from this Wired article making a very persuasive quantitative and qualitative argument for more Intellectual Property (IP) undergraduate courses--
"...IP literacy is not just for lawyers anymore."
As a related aside: Reflecting an increasing student desire and need for IP education, two out of every three terms per academic year since 2009, I've been teaching an IP elective course to graduate students at Pitt's School of Information Sciences (now the School of Computing and Information).
Additionally, in IP guest talks I've given for undergraduate students participating in Pitt's groundbreaking iSchool Inclusion Institute, it's been exciting to see first-hand many students' interest in augmenting their IP awareness...as well as more and more students creating and leveraging their own IP works!]
"Nor is there any doubt that IP plays a pivotal role in powering today’s knowledge economy, where intangible assets such as IP represent more than 80 percent of the market value of all publicly traded companies. Indeed, intellectual-property-intensive industries now account for a surprising 38.2 percent of total US GDP, according to a recent US Department of Commerce report. That’s more than $6 trillion a year, more than the GDP of any other nation except China. IP-based industries are also responsible for 30 percent, of national employment, or roughly 40 million jobs.
Yet despite IP's enormous role in the US economy, few universities offer any sort of course on IP to undergraduates. Among the first is the University of Southern California, which last fall launched a course on the basic workings of patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. The new course, through the Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies within USC’s Marshall School of Business, aims to train tomorrow’s leaders in the skills they need to navigate our increasingly IP-driven economy...
Put another way, just as tech literacy was once a requirement only for IT specialists but is now considered almost as essential as verbal literacy, IP literacy is not just for lawyers anymore.
All of which calls to mind that scene from the 1967 movie The Graduate, when Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke) offers career advice to a young Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman)?
“Plastics!” he says. “There’s a great future in plastics.”
Half a century later, USC is demonstrating that intellectual property has become the new watchword for almost any career of the future."
