Intellectual property has increasingly been recognized as a core intangible asset
that underpins the competitiveness of firms and organizations. Nevertheless,
graduate-level intellectual property education is often criticized for remaining largely
cen...
Intellectual property has increasingly been recognized as a core intangible asset
that underpins the competitiveness of firms and organizations. Nevertheless,
graduate-level intellectual property education is often criticized for remaining largely
centered on legal doctrines and institutional knowledge, thereby providing insufficient
support for practitioners to develop the competencies necessary to understand and
apply intellectual property in real work settings. This study aims to qualitatively
examine practitioners’ experiences of graduate intellectual property education and to
explore a practice-oriented instructional model and pedagogical strategies. To this end,
in-depth interviews were conducted with practitioner graduate students enrolled in the
master’s program in the Department of Convergence Intellectual Property at
Kyungpook National University, as well as with instructors responsible for intellectual
property-related courses.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, the data were
analyzed through the lenses of training transfer theory and practice-oriented learning
perspectives, including experiential learning, problem-based learning (PBL), and
project-based learning (PjBL). The findings are threefold. First, while graduate
intellectual property education was perceived to enhance understanding of fundamental
intellectual property concepts and systems—such as patents, trademarks, designs, and copyright—its
transfer to workplace practice was constrained by misalignments between academic
learning tasks and organizational realities (e.g., document formats, internal procedures,
and role structures). Second, practitioners strongly demanded instruction that
emphasizes authenticity, experience, and mentoring—particularly through engagement
with real patent filing documents, contracts, and technology transfer cases—yet
institutional conditions such as limited instructional hours, heterogeneous learner
profiles, and assessment structures were found to restrict the implementation of such
approaches. Third, based on these insights, this study proposes a practice-oriented
intellectual property education model and pedagogical strategies designed to strengthen
intellectual property understanding and application competence: a bifurcated curriculum
consisting of a common foundational component for all learners and advanced tracks
tailored to job roles and interests; short, intensive field-embedded experiences and
practice-based assignments grounded in authentic formats and cases; and the
systematic design of transfer mechanisms that enable the reuse of course-based
document templates, search tools, and evaluation criteria in workplace contexts.
By integrating training transfer theory with experiential learning perspectives, this
study offers actionable implications for designing and operating practitioner-centered
intellectual property education in general graduate programs. However, as a qualitative
case study limited to a single department and a small number of participants, the
findings should be interpreted with caution. Future research should employ
comparative designs across diverse institutions and incorporate quantitative approaches
to more rigorously examine the effects of intellectual property education on workplace
intellectual property understanding and application competence.
Keywords: Intellectual property education, Practitioner graduate students, Intellectual
property understanding and application competence, Practice-oriented instructional
model, Pedagogical strategies