I made my presentation to the Liverpool Inventors' Club on the economic downturn and what inventors can do about it to a good turnout yesterday. We welcomed a lot of new faces including Sean Thomas (whose picture appears to the left) and Guy Towlson of Marks and Clerk, David Ewing of D E Consultancy and inventor Ray Mullin as well as a lot of familiar faces.
A copy of my slides appears on Slidershare which is also also on my LinkedIn profile. I know the slides are dated 15 Oct but it is essentially the same talk.
I shall be giving the same talk to the Sheffield inventors club on 1 Dec at 18:00.
We had a very lively discussion after my presentation. There were 4 inventors who felt pretty disillusioned with the intellectual property system and were pretty gloomy as to their prospects in the downturn. The rest of us (particularly the professionals in the audience) tried to cheer them up. I did point out that there are advantages in starting a new business in a downturn if only because it should lift off on the upturn. My talk coincided with the Chancellor's announcement of a "fiscal stimulus" and while the economies of Western Europe and North America may be in the doldrums there should still be opportunities for growth in the BRICs states and elsewhere.
The other thing to announce is that we have now uploaded our training website at www.nipc-training.co.uk. We run two series of courses:
- advanced courses for IP specialists known as the staff college;
- introductory and intermediate courses for non-specialist lawyers and the general public known as the IP academy.
Finally we run a series of IP clinics in Yorkshire which we are keen to extend to the North West. To get some idea of what they are and what we do visit www.nipc-clinics.co.uk. If any IP specialist from the North West wants to help with any of these please let me know by filling the on-line patent request form.
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