Synopsis

Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce. IP is protected in law by, for example, patents, copyright and trademarks, which enable people to earn recognition or financial benefit from what they invent or create. By striking the right balance between the interests of innovators and the wider public interest, the IP system aims to foster an environment in which creativity and innovation can flourish.

There is nothing more evident of the above than in the wide scale use of the patented COVID-19 vaccines recently. This has had the immense commercial impacts on the Companies to be balanced against the suffering and lives of millions of people. Though the engineers’ inventions have not reached this level of human impact, but it is slowly gravitating towards that trend. In such circumstances, the engineer’s conflict of ‘why I should innovate to solve other people’s people ‘vs ‘ it is my duty as an engineer to innovate for the common good and solve problems ‘ becomes the main focus of the decision making.

The other moral conflict will be where the engineer can innovate something within his scope of work that saves the company hundreds of thousands of ringgit. Here, the issue will be the ‘what is in it for me?‘ question that needs to be answered. Companies will say that an engineer is paid to solve problems and improve situations, but the engineer will counter argue that engineering creativity needs to be rewarded separately.

This talk will address much of these concerns and attempt to provide possible solutions. If the engineer doesn’t innovate and solve problems, then we will become a ‘country of problems’ that will subsequently suffer economically. A perspective on the global currency exchange rates will provide some support for the dire need of IPs.


BIODATA SPEAKERS

Speaker 1

Ir. S. Vignaeswaran PEPC has more than 30 years of working experience in the electrical, computer, IT, SCADA, project management and tendering field. He has been involved in state-of-the-art applications which includes cyber-security from the 1990s. He has an Electrical Engineering degree from Monash University (Clayton, Australia) and MSc in IT/BIS from University of Keele, UK. He continues to publish international papers in Engineering, IT, Computer Security and Project Management fields. He has published the June 2019 IEM magazine that has solely focused on the new developments in Malaysian Cyber-Security approaches and trends, for the Malaysian engineering community.  


Speaker 2

Mr. Mohan is a founder and Managing Director for Adastra IP. He has accumulated nearly 20 years of solid experience in the Intellectual Property field. Mohan is a registered patent, trademark, industrial design agent and has won the best patent agent award by the Malaysian Intellectual Property Corporation in 2013. He is listed as a Global Top 1000 IP expert by IAM, an international IP journal publication and acknowledge by ASIAIP as one of the Top 50 IP experts for Malaysia.