Choose the right training
In a difficult climate for business, applied education is a key way to gain advantage over competitors. You hire the best people you can. Education allows them to perform at their best for you.
Choosing among the plethora of IP focused education offerings can be difficult. If you are looking to promote ‘out of the box’ thinking, holistic approaches and empower employees our recommendation and practice is to focus on courses that train participants for realistic judgment and strategic decision making and try to avoid out of the box training programs that are not customizable to you and your company.
As the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said: “If you tell me I will listen, if you show me I will see. But if you let me experience I will learn”. To get the most out of the IP course it is important that the learning experience be put into the context of your business and focused on solving a specific problem or reaching a concrete goal. An action based course will allow the participants to immediately grasp the value in the learning experience and clearly understand how their actions or inactions will affect the overall goal/aim.
With the proper guidance from the course facilitators, internalizing the fundamentals of strategy excellence and decision making tools in this way will allow for further repetition of thinking process under different circumstances. This can in turn have positive effect on the sense of development and fulfillment of your employees; improve their working outcome and increasing the return on investment for the company and its shareholders. After all, IP has no intrinsic value unless it is managed by people able recognize and take advantage the strategic opportunities it offers.
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2 Comments on “Choose the right training”
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That has been the philosophy behind the customisable courses I have developed with business clients. Each course is customised to the customer’s requirements. Content is agreed with the client. They choose from a menu of ‘micro-modules’ those aspects of IP and its management most relevant, given the duration of the proposed course. The choosing process, usually conducted in phone exchanges, is seen as part of the training. Course participants all come from the same company. This makes it easier to use confidential scenarios from the company’s experience – which might reveal incompetence, negligence or other negative behaviour that participants would be unwilling to share in a group comprising trainees from different companies.
Anecdotally, I recall one course with one company (project management) who had recently taken over a small software company. They had commissioned a one day IP training for a couple of senior execs because they wanted to understand IP and software. Going through the IP basics I asked about trade marks. Did they have any? and were they registered? ‘Yes and Yes’ they replied. To demonstrate the IPO tm database, we looked them up. There were none there. ‘But the software company we have just bought must have one for its main product’. We looked that up. It was on the database, but the registered proprietor was a Board colleague, who had negotiated the software company purchase, and who was about to retire. The two trainees’ faces fell. So apart from what they learnt that day about IP and software, they left with two tasks in hand: to follow up registration of company trade marks, and to wrest ownership of the recently acquired software trade mark from their soon to retire colleague.
Here’s the conversation going on over at facebook:
Arun Kashyap ”As
the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said: “If you tell me I will listen, if
you show me I will see. But if you let me experience I will learn”. To
get the most out of the IP course it is important that the learning
experience be put into t…See MoreYesterday at 12:22am · LikeDuncan Bucknell Thanks Dr Kashyap – that one was by Ana20 hours ago · LikeRuth Soetendorp customised training works – see comment on the link9 hours ago · LikeArun Kashyap Thanks,
Ruth. I agree with your assessment. However, I have a question. Does
the client really know what he needs? It’s like asking the patient about
the symptoms and giving the medicines. You may never reach to the basic
disease that such a client is suffering.9 hours ago · LikeRuth Soetendorp The
‘menu’ is quite comprehensive. Starting the dialogue with the client,
and involving the client in design of the programme, puts the onus on
the client to start and participate in an IP thinking process that they
may previously have resisted. The dialogue allows the
teacher/consultant to interpret back to the client what the client is
saying, and to guide the client towards a beneficial learning
experience.7 hours ago · Like · 1 person