Integrated practical e-training & e-guiding for innovative women for facilitating their patent applications

Project summary

ip4women targets to improve gender balance and reduce the gender gap in patenting by developing a systematic approach to introduce patent e-mentoring concept; aiming to e-train and/or e-guide those who would be a potential patent applicant inventors, also supply more enhanced initial and continuous training for those who would want to be a patent e-mentors for women in work-based environment. There are just a few inventor surveys on gender gap in patent applications but sufficient enough to highlight the huge difference of female and male patent applicants. A paper from Swedish Lund University (http://wp.circle.lu.se/upload/CIRCLE/workingpapers/201205_Ejermo_and_Jung.pdf) briefly presents this huge difference and highlights the contradiction of this phenomena with academic and scientist area bearing almost equal activity level from gender point of view, especially Ph.D. owners level. As there exists no statistical data explicitly on this issue, gender aspects of inventors have been mostly studied by researchers much more than other aspects, thanks to the fact that the first name works as a gender identifier in most cultures. On the other hand, The research of Hunt et al. (2012), quantified the gender patenting gap in USA: abolishing the gap in participation between males and females in science and engineering areas would increase GDP per capita by 2.7%, and commercialized patents by 24% (http://www.economics-sociology.eu/files/19_217_Rosario_Carmen.pdf). Eventually, in recognition of the prevalence of this gender imbalance, the 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which came into force on January 1, 2016. As a specialized agency of the United Nations, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is committed to promoting gender equality in the field of intellectual property and has taken steps to raise the profile of gender equality within the day-to-day running of the Organization (http://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_econstat_wp_33.pdf). WIPO calculates that it will take no less than 63 years (2080) to reach a balanced gender distribution of inventors under existing conditions as per 2015 data available, where in 2015, the share of female inventors stood at 15.1%, up from 9.5% in 1995. These shares are 10,5 in Sweden, 22,1 in Poland and 11,6 in Turkey between years 2011-2015 (No data is available for Slovakia); while 29,2 in China being world's highest share. Considering the low rates in Europe compared with China, Korea, and this duration will be longer for Europe, if no new efforts will be presented. ip4women has been designed for supporting the Europe's need in this gender balance efforts, in parallel to above mentioned UN's 2030 Agenda and also EC initiatives (https://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/structural-changes-final-report_en.pdf); consequently bringing a new VET based approach, supporting the creation of new vocation, IP e-Mentoring and tackling the problem via this channel. There are resources available in EPO (www.epo.org) and WIPO (www.wipo.int) for learning about IPR and/or patenting. In addition, similar resources are there at national level, through national patent offices. However, these information and trainings are complex and time consuming for those who need brief and quick knowledge and information. For this purpose, ip4women will perform: - IPR & patenting practical multi-level e-learning "content need" analysis, by holding practical and intelligent surveys by the aid of partner women NGOs in all project countries, - Develop multi-level IPR & patenting e-learning and e-guiding platform for e-Mentors as well as patent applicants, - Test the whole system, including mentor-mentee relations, individual information seekers responses, e-guiding performance by using intelligent and interactive feedback toolkit, - Optimise the overall system by using the continuous feedback and include volunteer e-mentors for better sustainability of the complete ip4women system. The partnership has been established to be able to realise all this ip4women environment as: - Uppdragshuset [SE] - IPR and patent specialist SME and R/D performer, expert in Mentoring - MINERVA [SE], ZARIF[SK], TAKIDD [TR], FEuCP [PL] - Women NGOs having direct access to target group from different scientific backgrounds, various expertise - POINT [TR] - R/D performing SME expert in Mentoring, development of e-Learning infrastructures - ITeE-PIB [PL] - R/D in VET having also various patent applicant practices - MOJMIR [SK] - VET and entrepreneurship training where gender imbalance is at average rate of Europe, including the total patent applications are average or below average. Poland 4,815; Sweden 2,428; Turkey 5,841; Slovakia 256; Where Germany 66,893; Europe 360,000; China 1,101,864; World 2,888,800 (2015 data from http://ipstats.wipo.int/ipstatv2/index.htm).