LES Education Offerings

By Matthew McNeill, LES Education Director

As LES is committed to being the premiere professional society for professionals in the broad field of Intellectual Capital Management (ICM), LES is developing and expanding our education offerings to be consistent with this mission. This includes not only offering existing courses more broadly and more often, but also developing new education content.

Consistent with this approach, LES has published a full schedule of 2018 education offerings at /page/2018edcalendar. The Society will be presenting education in association with its national meetings, particularly the LESI Annual Conference being hosted by LES in San Diego in the spring and the LES (U.S.A. & Canada) Annual Meeting in Boston in the autumn. In addition, LES will be continuing the tradition of holding LES University. In an effort to make "LESU" more accessible, it will be offered two times in the course of a year in different locations. For 2018, the first version with be LESU South—being hosted in Houston by the location sponsor Bracewell LLP from March 20–23. LESU South will include the intermediate level course "Business Development in IP Licensing." In September of 2018, LESU North will be presented in Chicago, and include not only the "BD in IP Licensing" course again, but also a freshly updated Advanced class in Strategic Licensing, building upon and expanding the skills from the intermediate course. In 2019, we are planning on holding LESU East and West in locations to be determined with similar course offerings. Other existing courses are on the schedule to be offered in different locations throughout the year.

In developing new ICM education content, LES will be drawing upon the expertise of its members to assemble more targeted courses allowing deeper dives into specific topics. Options being evaluated include new courses in domains of ICM parallel to many of LES's standards activities including Valuation, ICM in the Supply Chain, and ICM in the Boardroom. LES is also evaluating creating courses in ICM and Analytics, ICM in M&A transactions, ICM Issues in Start-ups, and Organizational Structure to Optimize ICM. As this content cannot all be created at once, LES will be working with our members and potential members to prioritize these options. In that regard, the Society will be conducting a survey with the ICM Executive Thought Leaders at this year's IP100 in Phoenix to create that prioritized list. Following that, the hard work of creating world-class ICM content will begin in earnest. Please stay tuned into 2019 as LES begins rolling out this broadened ICM curriculum. 

See Page 10 in the March issue of LES Viewpoints for the full Education Calendar.