Celia Lerman, our partner and expert in Intellectual Property Law at Lerman & Szlak, was part of the experts’ panel at the Open Innovation Online Course 5th session on July 1, 2020, offered by the Ministry of Productive Development of Argentina and the Office of Industry, Knowledge Economy, & External Commercial Management. This session was dedicated to the role of Intellectual Property in Open Innovation and the different methods available to share new inventions while preserving core elements of IP.

In her lecture, Celia explained how to design and implement IP Strategies in Open Innovation projects. This way, both individual and organizations can share their innovations and increase their value without losing control over such creations’ terms. This advantage is among the reasons why open source licenses have gained popularity and become widespread over the last decade. As a result, many businesses are using them intentionally to share their knowledge and guarantee that such assets would continue to be governed as they planned. She provided current examples of technology shared to fight Covid-19 under open licenses (like the Medtronic ventilator), and proposed a three steps approach to design efficient Open IP Strategies for similar cases:

Overall, Celia recommended a balanced approach when applying IP legal tools in order to incentive collaborative creation and the exchange of ideas, showing that there is no need to stablish totally exclusive IP Rights over an asset to protect it, nor to free it as public domain to be able to share it. Instead, analyzing the advantages and challenges of Open Innovation alongside an expert is necessary to prepare the IP Strategy on each case.

We invite our clients, colleagues, and friends to watch the video and to enroll in the remaining sessions of the Course, and/or visit the previous sessions here. We also congratulate the other panelists and the Course organizers for offering this knowledge while Covid19 is still part of our daily lives. Once again, we wish to reaffirm that the promotion of Open Innovation’s benefits is paramount to support the changes that have been accelerated as a result of this global crisis.

For more information about Open Innovation and IP Strategy, contact us at info@lermanszlak.com.