Detailed Plan
Our plan is simple. Design and deliver country focussed IP and IA training to entrepreneurs (whether experienced or inexperienced). Help the trainee community understand the IP and IA. We prefer to work in coordination with local partners in a country of interest e.g. Turkey, Malaysia, South Africa, China, Brazil, USA, Northern Ireland - we have suitable innovation community contacts in all these countries already and are also interested to explore this programme in Mexico, Thailand with our contacts there, plus via this proposal seek an innovation contact in a second African country e.g. Ethiopia?
By delivering this programme we will create meaningful and lasting impact with entrepreneurs.
How do we deliver on the DLT Entrepreneurship Toolbox challenge? We enable Entrepreneurs to acquire new skills that they can apply to their DLT business. Our focus on intangible assets will ensure that they do not leak value from their operations and that they are able to generate revenue to support and grow the business. We understand the unique challenge of developing a new business whilst operating in an open (and open-source) environment and can help companies address this challenge.
We deliver IP training to clients on a regular basis and already have syllabii to call upon for this purpose. However it is preferable to agree a syllabus for each type of trainee cohort in each country - as trainees in a cohort will have different requirements and different levels of prior experience.
We would offer 10 training programmes at £6000 GBP each. At 1.4 USD to 1 GBP this equates to 84,000 USD. We can deliver these courses virtually to a large number of people simultaneously however it is preferable to deliver to smaller groups and then to be available to provide support to the trainees individually. Whilst the normal size of cohort is 10-15 in the UK (where we also provide significant one to one support to each trainee) in other countries we often find there is less desire to have one to one support therefore, working with our local partners we can increase the number of attendees of the training to a higher number e.g. 60. Each attendee can be provided with a personalised certificate of attendance.
For a subset of those trained we suggest that IP audits are made available. We would suggest that the local partners choose who should have the IP Audit. An IP Audit looks at the full complement of IP assets held by a company, reviews them, meets team members and delivers a report to the company. In the UK the UK Intellectual Property Office provides grants to companies of £2500 for this type of offering. In the EU there are grants of 1500 Euros. Some countries like Ireland provide national IP Strategy grants for 2700 Euros. SMEs in the UK can pay e.g. £5000 for more advanced and substantial IP audits (generally for more mature businesses), sometimes more. We suggest we offer IP Audits at the UK IPO rate of £2500 with a 10% discount (£2250+VAT where applicable). Our team members have delivered hundreds of IP Audits - many sponsored (via UK grant programmes) by UK Intellectual Property Office (who review each audit for quality control).
We suggest we deliver 20 IP Audits over the year (2 each month from each training cohort). This would cost 63,000 USD and is excluding VAT if applicable - we do not believe it is applicable for non-EU parties. If it is applicable we can ask the clients to pay for the VAT portion.
More info on our Mathys & Squire Consulting is found at this link: - <https://www.mathys-squire.com/intellectual-property-services/mathys-squire-consulting/> The Consulting company is a sister company of Mathys & Squire LLP - one of the UK's top patent and trademark attorney firms.
Our lead consultant for this project is Richard Nugent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardnugent/ Other key team members include Anthony Coleman and Lawrence Bickers.
Impact
The proposal impacts the challenge by delivering important knowledge relating to the acquisition, use and commercialisation of Intellectual Property and Intangible Assets.
Launch - public launch December 2021
We can begin scoping this activity in early November. Trainings would (given time for organisation and publicity) occur no earlier than December 2021 with the audits for the December cohort being delivered in January. We suggest 10 trainings from December to September 2022 (inclusive) and 2 audits are delivered each month (20 in total) from January to October 2022.
Success
Success will be measured in delivery of each training, feedback from each training and delivery and feedback from the IP Audits. Training attendee and local partner feedback on the quality of our delivery will define our success.
We look forward to collaborating with the Cardano community and with the entrepreneurs in the ecosystem. We encourage you to reach out to us via this platform or [email protected] for more details.
