A warm welcome to this course in IP management for researchers at KTH! It's great to have you here!

As researchers at KTH, you investigate and develop things. This means that you gain knowledge and produce many different types of research results that collectively can be called Intellectual Property (IP). In other words, a big part of your job as a researcher is to produce Intellectual Property!

This course is about giving you the knowledge and tools to handle that Intellectual Property in a conscious and proactive way so that you and other collaboration partners can use it to create value and impact in society. This is what we mean by “IP management”.

Raising the overall knowledge at KTH in IP management is important, as you will hear in this welcome greeting from KTH's Deputy President Mikael Östling and Vice President for Research Annika Stensson Trigell.

You own the IP you create - your opportunity to do something good with it!

Sweden has the so called Professor’s privilege ("Lärarundantaget" in Swedish), which broadly speaking says that teachers and researchers at Swedish universities have an exemption from the rule that an employer owns the results of an employee’s work. Based on this, the KTH IP guidelines (in Swedish and English) is that you as a researcher own the results and IP that you create in your work at KTH, unless you have signed any agreements saying otherwise.

This means that good IP management to a great extent comes down to your decisions and actions in your day-to-day research work. This is what we want to help you prepare for with this course!

The Professor's privilege is both an opportunity and a responsibility. This course helps you make the most of it.

A few words about the course

The course consists of 7 modules that cover different topics related to IP management.

Module 1 focuses on what IP actually is and some key definitions and vocabulary related to Intellectual Property. The rationale is that it's a lot easier to discuss IP management if we all have a common terminology and understanding of what we mean when we talk about IP.
Module 2 introduces a framework to describe the research process from idea to impact that makes the discussions around IP management much easier to structure.
Modules 3 to 7 dive deeper into specific issues to keep in mind when dealing with IP in your research and give practical advice and resources for how to handle them.

This course has been developed by KTH Innovation and Research Support Office with the goal of giving you an understanding of key concepts in practical IP management and the support available at KTH.

Both KTH Innovation and Research Support Office deal with IP management related questions.

Research Support Office is your main point of contact for questions relating to research collaborations and research agreement where KTH is the party to the agreement.
KTH Innovation is your main point of contact for questions relating to how you can commercialize and create impact from your research results and agreements where you are the party to the agreement.

Much of the information and resources here is already available in different formats at KTH, but it is spread across many different places and not easy to find and digest. We have tried to collect all the relevant information about IP management at KTH in one place and make it easily accessible.

Our ambition is to make all content easy to understand and explain what it is, why it matters to you, and how it works in practice at KTH. We hope that we have succeeded!

Welcome to the course! Here we go!

Go to Module 1

PS. On behalf of the whole project group at KTH Innovation and RSO, we wish you the best of luck!

Therese Viksten

Gustav Notander, Business Development Coach, KTH Innovation

Therese Viksten, Legal Counsel, KTH Innovation

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This course is partly developed within the VINNOVA funded "IMP project" - "Implementation of work processes and increased knowledge about knowledge assets and intellectual property rights - for strengthened collaboration and societal responsibility at the Swedish universities".

The overall goal of the IMP project is to develop the capacity at Swedish universities to handle knowledge assets and intellectual property rights to become better at collaborating and creating impact.

More info about the IMP project here (in Swedish)