UM-Dearborn has a lot of ways to help students differentiate themselves in preparation for their post-college lives. Co-ops and internships help undergraduate students build real-world, paid work experience in their fields — sometimes years of it — before they even graduate. Practice-based learning, including programs like the College of Engineering and Computer Science's Senior Design program, means students get to create real things, often in partnership with community organizations and industry partners. And for those interested in academic careers, there are a growing number of opportunities for students to work alongside faculty on research and publish and present their work. Clinical Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Kas Kasravi thinks all these things are great. But as someone with both an engineering and a law background, and who worked for decades in industry, including for big companies like General Motors and Hewlett-Packard, he felt like there was something obvious the university could add to this arsenal of programming. “At universities and certain research organizations, it’s all about publishing papers. But that is not the case in industry. In one case, when I published a paper, my company even refused to pay for my air travel to go present at the conference because they didn’t see the value in it. But these companies highly value patents,” explains Kasravi, who personally holds 31 patents. “That’s how they make money, because patents keep the competition at bay. So if we are producing engineers, we should be giving them the skills to come up with inventions, patent them and then take them to market.”
Interestingly, Kasravi says helping students patent their innovations hasn’t been something universities have traditionally focused on. But UM-Dearborn’s new Henry W. Patton Entrepreneurship, Practice and Innovation Center, or EPIC, which was launched with support from Provost Ghassan Kridli and is now being led by Kasravi, is hoping to change that. With philanthropic support from the Song Foundation, EPIC is now debuting a slate of opportunities focused on promoting student-owned patents that support entrepreneurship and startup companies. Currently, EPIC’s flagship offering is an Intellectual Property Clinic, which guides students with patentable ideas and inventions through the complex federal patent application process. “There are other resources out there, like YouTube, that could help you do that. But they’re all passive, meaning you can’t ask questions. And if you run into a couple of things that don’t make sense, you might just stop,” Kasravi says. “The approach at EPIC is active. We don’t give legal advice. But through each step, I meet with the students, answer their questions, show them examples and direct them towards things that might be out there but are hard to find.”
CECS graduate student Michael Olaniran and College of Business graduate student Olakunle Ogunjimi recently participated in the IP Clinic, which helped them successfully file a provisional patent for a subscription management system they are working on. The two friends, who came to UM-Dearborn from Calgary, Alberta, got started on this idea when Ogunjimi was struggling with a characteristic annoyance of our times: canceling a subscription for a service. Between the two of them, they had pretty extensive tech and legal backgrounds, so they began thinking about whether they could create something that could help consumers. An initial search revealed there were a few products already out there, but Ogunjimi and Olaniran noticed they were all services that focused on negotiating already-posted charges on the consumer’s behalf. Their idea was different: They wanted to create a system that would use artificial intelligence to manage a person’s subscriptions with the least amount of effort. For example, it would connect to a person’s email and credit card accounts and automatically detect which subscriptions someone has, including ones they might not know they’re still paying for. It would also detect details, like when free trial periods ended. Then, using a simple dashboard, consumers could cancel subscriptions via an app — or direct an AI agent to do so using simple prompts like “cancel my Netflix subscription next month.” The system would handle the rest, automatically routing a cancellation email to the correct source. As a failsafe, they also envisioned integrating a virtual debit card for all subscriptions, so that a user could simply block payments if the company continued to try to charge them.
Interestingly, this idea is something Olaniran and Ogunjimi were working on outside of their formal studies. When they were discussing it one day with one of their professors, he mentioned they might want to take the idea to the COB dean, who, in turn, put them in touch with Kasravi. Olaniran and Ogunjimi jumped at the chance to participate in the IP Clinic. They say it’s difficult to overstate how helpful it’s been. For example, they say they initially got a quote of $6,000 for a third-party patent search and $15,000 for a provisional patent filing. The support they got from the clinic, including use of some top-shelf patent search software, meant they could do the search and filing for free. “On our very first visit to the IP Clinic, I told Olakunle, all the international fees I paid to come to UM-Dearborn, this is the highlight so far, because it works so well,” Olaniran says. “You’re going through all the patent drawings step-by-step. You’re drafting the claims. You’re learning how you can avoid intellectual property disputes. So the whole time, you’re learning actively. You feel like you’re onto something. We honestly think everyone should do the clinic.” The connections they made through the clinic also helped them score some invaluable advice from other start-up founders who are further along in bringing their products to market. And Olaniran and Ogunjimi recently landed a $75,000 business accelerator grant from Ann Arbor SPARK to support the ongoing patent process and commercialization of their product.
It’s still early days for EPIC and the IP Clinic, but Kasravi is already proud of the results. To date, nine students have successfully submitted patent applications for three different inventions, and Kasravi is currently working with another 16 students on five other patentable projects. The biggest feather in their cap so far: Several students Kasravi worked with in a similar fashion before EPIC was officially established were just granted a patent for a portable article lifter, separator and compressor. Now, Kasravi says EPIC plans to start building out capacity across the university’s four colleges, starting with CECS’ Senior Design program. “There, you have 45 to 50 projects from student teams, and some of the work coming out of that program is potentially patentable,” he says. “Now, the students will have the support they need to pursue patent applications.” He hopes EPIC will eventually be able to extend the same services to the wider community, so that innovators in the region can get support navigating one of the most vital, but daunting, parts of the innovation process.
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Story by Lou Blouin. Photo by Matthew Stephens.
