U.S. Patent Office opens community engagement office at University of Utah

In a salute to the entrepreneurial spirit evident in Utah, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has opened a community engagement office at the University of Utah. 

Housed in the University Research Park’s Myriad Genetics building, the office will help drive innovation by providing intellectual property education, resources and expertise for students, entrepreneurs, businesses and communities across the Mountain West.

In an agreement signed recently at an event on the UofU campus, the university will partner with the USPTO to build a hub for outreach under the Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022.

“The Mountain West Community Engagement Office is present and accounted for to the citizens of Utah to help their intellectual property dreams of today become the reality of tomorrow,” said USPTO Director John Squires before the signing the agreement with Jamie P. Dwyer, a nephrologist serving as the UofU’s executive associate vice president of research and interim chief innovation officer. The USPTO, part of the U.S. Commerce Department, has set up similar offices at the University of New Hampshire and Montana State University, with more planned to come.

“It’s more than outreach offices. It’s engagement. It’s standing shoulder to shoulder, to embrace the future together,” Squires said. “That’s why taking office and with my deep experience with startups and emerging companies, we’ve reimagined our future footprint as one of immersive community engagement, an agile and responsive model to meet innovators where they are in their context, in their experience to engage head-on with the elusive shape-shifter that is inherently innovation in whatever vestige it takes.”

The new community engagement office will cover an eight-state region that includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Nebraska. The UofU was selected to host the office because it has built one of the strongest commercialization pipelines in the Mountain West, fueled by $781 million in research activity last year, with an aggressive plan for growth.

“Our industry partnerships span biotech, AI, advanced engineering and energy,” said Dwyer. “Each year, our researchers submit hundreds of invention disclosures. Those disclosures become patents. Those patents become licensed technologies, startup companies and solutions that improve lives.”

Speakers at the signing event highlighted innovations developed at the university that went on to have real-world impact, from a folding cot patented in 1921 to the artificial heart to the Utah Bionic Leg.

“Strong intellectual property systems make that translation possible,” Dwyer said. “The USPTO’s community engagement offices are designed to cultivate and expand vibrant innovation, investment and entrepreneurship supported by intellectual property. By embedding this presence within our startup, university and innovation communities, the USPTO is strengthening regional access and reinforcing the Mountain West as a nationally competitive innovation economy.”

University of Utah Librarian Talli Casucci also touted the role of her department in the patent process during the event.

“We’re part of a network of libraries across the nation that provide intellectual property support, patent and trademark searching and educating the public about everything USPTO, demystifying that process.”

Squires is a veteran patent lawyer who recently left private industry to serve the Trump administration as undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property.

He noted that the USPTO is among the nation’s oldest agencies, established under the Constitution “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

“Now here in Utah, we extend that legacy both in a new direction and at the same time back to the future,” Squires said. “The future of tomorrow’s innovation ecosystem does not exist one-dimensionally or linearly only in faraway examination rooms in Alexandria,” he said. “It lives and breathes and takes flight in the places where ideas are first imagined, where a flash of genius leaves its indelible mark, where sweat of the brow of 99 percent perspiration in the research lab like those on this campus.”

As part of UofU’s agreement, the USPTO will place up to three full-time employees on campus for an initial one-year period, with the option to extend by mutual agreement. Leading the team is Ken Takeda, interim acting director of the USPTO’s Mountain West Community Engagement Office. As the longest-serving regional outreach officer, Takeda helped establish USPTO’s western office in California’s Silicon Valley and oversaw its daily operations for more than a decade.

“The community engagement offices allow us to be more agile,” Takeda said. “We can customize the resources and information we provide the public to meet the needs of the communities by focusing on the technologies and issues driving innovation in the region.”