Welcome to the Paul Janssen Futurelab Leiden Intellectual Property Online course!

Your online course “Intellectual Property” starts next Monday, 11 January. My name is Bruno Vandermeulen and I will be your mentor during the next five weeks and look forward to interact with you.

In this edition of the course, we have a nice group of entrepreneurial professionals from academia, smaller biotech companies and industry. This diverse composition will enable you to learn from each other by exchanging your views about what you will learn.

For an overview of the course, register on the Paul Janssen Futurelab website or go directly to your online classroom and click on the tab “Overview – All course items” where you will see the content of course on a week-by-week basis. Every upcoming Monday, starting on Monday 11 January, a new week will be unlocked for you. We call this ‘the content-dripping principle’.

You will also see on your online classroom that we have two video calls planned with all of you on Wednesday afternoon 13 and 27 January, each time from 15.00 -16.00 h CET (Amsterdam time). Please mark these real-time meetings in your calendar so that we can make acquaintance and I can answer any questions you may have about the course. Your first feedback will also be welcome !

Be prepared to schedule at least 5 hours for each week to follow your course, read the course materials (to be downloaded from the course site) to perform your assignments and to discuss topics with your classmates, who you can also meet in the online classroom. You can always decide to return to an earlier part of the course, and you can complete the assignments at the time and in the order that you prefer. But it is recommended not to drift away from the proposed schedule for more than a few days.

Although you can always catch up a course in a subsequent week, drifting away for more than a week will prevent you from having meaningful conversations with your classmates, and may force you to catch everything up during the last week !

I hope you will learn a lot from this course and experience it as meaningful. I look forward to reading your assignments and discuss with you about the fascinating issues that intellectual property law presents in the Life Sciences area. Please feel free to contact me at any time if you need me.

Enjoy!
Bruno