Pedagogical Experience in Engineering Education: Studying Cases of Patent Dispute as a Method for Both Innovation and Legal Education

The issue of intellectual property is inevitable for an engineering design course today. Traditionally, it would be discussed separately from the technical or the legal perspective. But they are two sides of the same coin. In the course of comparative analysis of patent dispute, the case method was used to treat the issue involved from both perspectives at the same time. Patent disputes are mainly concerned with the issue of patentability or infringement, and normally both involved. For analysis of a dispute, it is normally required to compare the elements of the invented object with either the prior arts or the alleged infringement, depending on the cases. For such legal analysis one can instead take design methods such as TRIZ (an acronym in Russian standing for “theory of inventive problem solving”) and SCAMPER (an acronym standing for “substitute, combine, adapt, magnify or minify, put to other uses, eliminate or elaborate, and rearrangement or reverse”) to check the design concepts or the inventive principles behind the objects, so that the students can learn the innovation methods and the legal procedure at the same time. In this paper pedagogical experience with concrete examples was demonstrated.