Ever since it’s foundation, Skoltech wasn’t intended to be an ivory tower. It was always supposed to be involved with society and industry. As stated in its guiding principles, one of Skoltech’s goals is interfacing with industrial commercialization and venture opportunities. The office in charge of handling the technology transfer and commercialization of the research done in Skoltech is the Knowledge Transfer Office, also known as KTO.

On March 1st, KTO held the “IP Day”, an event that is aimed to expose Skoltech community, mainly Faculty, researchers and PhD students, to the process of commercializing their intellectual property (hence IP), and how the KTO can help them make the most out of it. During the event, the audience received: an introduction to IP management and technology transfer management; Typical IP related challenges based on real cases; Overview about the technology transfer process from A-Z; and Q & A – open discussion.

The audience was involved even prior to the beginning. At the entrance the organizers put big boards with different related topics on them, and each participant was invited to rank the topics according to their relevance to him/her.

The event was officially opened with welcoming words by Ilia Dubinsky, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, who pointed out the importance of the event due to the fact that not enough people in Skoltech know about KTO and the IP management services available for researchers. After that the microphone moved to Sergey Ulyakhin, the licensing and technology transfer manager, who led the entire event afterwards.

“Here in Skoltech there is a certain course of IP management for students”, Ulyakhin said when he was asked what the purpose of the event was, “but there’s no IP course for faculty and researchers. It’s a very important knowledge because if more and more people will know how technology should be managed and why, the commercialization will be more successful. The main objective of today’s event is to increase the IP awareness of people who didn’t have a chance to get this knowledge before. Our office is limited in resources, and we can’t convey the message of our services to everyone face to face. That’s why we decided to make an event, where we can gather many people and convey this information to a bigger audience in a relatively short period of time”.

When he was asked to sum-up the event, he replied “For me it was a successful event. The number of people who arrived exceeded my expectations, they asked a lot of relevant questions, were really engaged, and I’m glad that we did it. It seemed like people really have some active projects with IP issues, and most probably many of them will come to KTO to continue the discussion about their cases”.

You can find the majority of the practical information that Ulyakhin gave the audience on the KTO page, but if we could mark one golden rule given today, it would be this: IP management can, should and does support the Skoltech’s innovation mission!