Newswise — The University of Utah is now home to a federally run community engagement office established by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, to help drive innovation by providing intellectual property education, resources and expertise for students, entrepreneurs, businesses and communities across the Mountain West.
Under an agreement signed Feb. 20, in Research Park’s Myriad Genetics building, which will house the new office, the U will partner with the USPTO to build a hub for outreach under the Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022.
“The Mountain West Community Engagement Office is present and accounted for to the citizens of Utah to help their intellectual property dreams of today become the reality of tomorrow,” said USPTO Director John Squires before the signing the agreement with Jamie P. Dwyer, a nephrologist serving as the university’s Executive Associate Vice President of Research and Interim Chief Innovation Officer. The U.S. Commerce Department has set up similar offices at the University of New Hampshire and Montana State University, with more on the horizon.
“It’s more than outreach offices. It’s engagement. It’s standing shoulder to shoulder, to embrace the future together,” Squires said. “That’s why taking office and with my deep experience with startups and emerging companies, we’ve reimagined our future footprint as one of immersive community engagement, an agile and responsive model to meet innovators where they are in their context, in their experience to engage head on with the elusive shape shifter that is inherently innovation in whatever vestige it takes.”
The new community engagement office will cover an eight-state region that includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Nebraska. The U was selected to the office because it has built one of the strongest commercialization pipelines in the Mountain West, fueled by $781 million in research activity last year, with an aggressive plan for growth.
“Our industry partnerships span biotech, AI, advanced engineering, and energy,” Dwyer said. “Each year, our researchers submit hundreds of invention disclosures. Those disclosures become patents. Those patents become licensed technologies, startup companies, and solutions that improve lives.”
Friday’s speakers highlighted innovations developed at the U and went onto to have real-world impact, from a folding cot patented in 1921 to the artificial heart to the Utah Bionic Leg.
“Strong intellectual property systems make that translation possible,” Dwyer said. “The USPTO’s community engagement offices are designed to cultivate and expand vibrant innovation, investment, and entrepreneurship supported by intellectual property. By embedding this presence within our startup, university and innovation communities, the USPTO is strengthening regional access and reinforcing the Mountain West as a nationally competitive innovation economy.”
The U’s new arrangement with federal officials adds to a long-established network of IP resources on campus, such as the Technology Licensing Office, S.J. Quinney Coll
ege of Law and the 41-year-old Patent and Trademark Resource Center in the Marriott Library.
“We’re part of a network of libraries across the nation that provide intellectual property support, patent and trademark searching, and educating the public about everything USPTO, demystifying that process,” said U librarian Tallie Casucci.
Squires is a veteran patent lawyer who recently left private industry to serve the Trump administration as Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property.
He noted that the USPTO is among the nation’s oldest agencies, established in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which endeavors “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
“Before there was a Treasury Department, before there was a Department of State, before there were most of the institutions that we all now take for granted, there was a commitment to invention,” Squires said. “In 1790, President George Washington signed the first U.S. patent. Thomas Jefferson served as our first patent examiner from the birth of the republic. Innovation was not peripheral, it was central and still is part of the American experiment itself.”
Over the next two centuries, he continued, this experiment has continued through steam engines and steel, to electricity and aviation, to semiconductors, software biotechnology and artificial intelligence.
“Now here in Utah, we extend that legacy both in a new direction and at the same time back to the future. The future of tomorrow’s innovation ecosystem does not exist one dimensionally or linearly only in far away examination rooms in Alexandria,” he said. “It lives and breathes and takes flight in the places where ideas are first imagined, where a flash of genius leaves its indelible mark, where sweat of the brow of 99% perspiration in the research lab like those on this campus.”
As part of U’s agreement, the USPTO will place up to three full-time employees on campus for an initial one-year period, with the option to extend by mutual agreement. Leading the team is Ken Takeda, interim acting director of the USPTO’s Mountain West Community Engagement Office. As the longest-serving regional outreach officer, Takeda helped establish USPTO’s Western office in California’s Silicon Valley and oversaw its daily operations for more than a decade. Now, he looks forward to working closely with emerging inventors.
“The community engagement offices allow us to be more agile,” Takeda said. “We can customize the resources and information we provide the public to meet the needs of the communities by focusing on the technologies and issues driving innovation in the region.”
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