Meeting of the Supervisory Board of the EPO Academy

On 26 September 2017 there was a meeting of the Supervisory Board of the EPO Academy, where the activities and future plans of the Academy were discussed. The EPO Academy is a highly respected partner of epi in the field of educating our profession. Tony Tangena, our immediate past president, attended this meeting on behalf of epi as an observer.

The Supervisory Board approved the Academy’s activities and suggested new ones. The scope of activities of the Academy is large and particularly focused on supporting training for five target groups: Professional Representatives (epi members), the Judicial System, Academia Institutions (Patent Offices) and the current and future users of the European patent system. Many of their activities are illustrated on the web site of the Academy: http://www.epo.org/learning-events.html Particularly worth looking at are presentations on the business aspects of IP in many languages (ip4inno), SME case studies, patent terminology manuals for professional representatives and IP litigation in Europe. There are further training manuals on teaching IP and how to set up an IP course.

Very successful activities for epi members are further Conferences, like Examination Matters and Guidelines2day roadshows, where the Academy and epi cooperate. Some of these conferences attracted more than 600 epi members in different venues. Since last year, after a request from epi, seminars for patent administrators and paralegals were organized. These will be continued in different locations across Europe, since the Academy found they are very popular and highly appreciated. The Academy also supports a pre-diagnostic training scheme, where the institutions get an IP audit methodology to analyze and advise companies on IP. We hope the institutions involve our members in these activities. The Academy trained preselected national judges for the Unified Patent Court and they were positive about using the training material also for training epi members. New topics like how to enforce IP in Europe are planned.

All in all the Academy is a very useful and well appreciated partner of epi that is a great help for epi in making sure our members are well trained and aware of the latest developments.