Polytechnic’s Patent For Future-Proofing Students

Author
JOHN ROSS

Higher Education reporter

David Martin is heading an innovation-led revolution of training at Melbourne Polytechnic. Picture: Aaron Francis.

A resurgent Melbourne TAFE is redefining education-industry engagement, drafting an American finance guru and his analytics engine to give its courses high-street smarts.

Melbourne Polytechnic has established a Centre of Applied Innovation housing what it claims is the world’s most complete record of patents and associated financial analytics. At its helm is David Martin, a biomedical engineer turned intellectual property expert, who went from running the University of Virginia’s technology transfer arm to become the world’s “knowledge underwriter”.

The centre’s aim is to orient courses and careers around what the commercial world has decided is important, rather than somebody’s best guess.

“Big data has allowed the market to be able to measure the effect of innovation,” Martin says.

“Once you can measure the market consequence of the innovation — the science, the research, the development, the technology, all of those things at the cutting edge of thought — you’re not just going to change how you teach, you’re also going to change what you teach.”

In the 1990s, Martin developed a method for appraising the real value of intangible assets such as IP, brands, software and design. His linguistic-based algorithms, which operate across different languages, transcend simple keyword searches in mining patents and tender records to judge the worth of IP claims.

Martin’s technology is used by patent offices, banks and federal reserves around the world, while he has advised finance and investment programs on four continents. His company M. CAM claims to have data on every patent, trademark and copyright from all 168 World Trade Organisation member countries, with records stretching back to 1786 and updated weekly.

Martin also was invited by financial news network CNBC to set up a new stockmarket index. The CNBC IQ100, which claims to outperform the Dow Jones, was launched last October.

“We have set up a mirror image of all of his technology at Melbourne Polytechnic,” says Rob Wood, the institution’s Canadian-born chief executive.

A former education chief in British Columbia and deputy secretary of education in Victoria, Mr Wood joined Melbourne Polytechnic soon after its rebirth from the financially troubled Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE.

“They had changed the name without a deep understanding of what a polytechnic was,” he says. “The rationale was, we have a failing organisation, we need to disrupt it with something that sounds better.”

Wood wants to disrupt the entire tertiary landscape. “What we are going to be doing, ultim­ately, is teaching our students about innovation literacy.

“If you think about a knowledge economy and where the future is going — not what we traditionally teach — what skills are students going to need? Things like business acumen, analytics, research skills, evaluation abilities, engineering and design.”

He says these “foundational building blocks” will be woven through Melbourne Polytechnic’s undergraduate offerings. The curriculum also features a heavy emphasis on work placements, culminating in “capstone internships” in the third year.

The incentive for companies to come on board is the data repository, which provides access to millions of innovations — most of them not even patent protected in Australia.

“Industry partners” will be required to bankroll scholarships and endowments as well as providing work experience.

Wood says the students will come armed with “strategically relevant insights” delivering “real economic returns” to the companies. “We unabashedly expect to make a commercial difference to our corporate partners,” he says.

Martin says it’s a completely new take on industry experience, although he downplays the significance of the patents repository. “What transforms education is not having a database, what transforms education is the intelligent market-sensitive use of that information,” he says.

“We’re teaching students how to identify where there are interventions of value that are responsive to industry needs. You’re not hiring somebody because they have a technical competency with a degree. You’re hiring somebody because they’re solving your real problems today.”

Martin says his new stockmarket index is key in moving away from what he dismisses as a “manufacturing view” of education. “It shows where the innovation of consequence is happening in the market,” he says.

“The index tells us where industry is placing their bets, where they’re making their value determination. That information can feed back into education, so that we train our students to be relevant to where industry is actually going.”

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http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/polytechnics-patent-for-futureproofing-students/news-story/be4b8ab71c7f3fe94c39e3259360eda8