Possible Topics for Future Lectures and Workshops

1. New ideas and commercially viable ideas – why most inventions never make it to market

2. Psychological factors giving confidence to inventors and propping up general creativity

3. Interdisciplinary studies and interdisciplinary inventions

4. How to write a business plan for an invention

5. Technical creativity and innovation in theater representations and playwriting in France’s XVII-XVIII centuries

6. Physics and inventions: 20 centuries of machineries

7. Patent offices around the world

8. History of patent laws – from royal privileges to modern industrial protection

9. Technical creativity and the development of modern art

10. Biology and inventions – what is patentable and how?

11. Computer science and inventions – what is patentable?

12. Society, social rules, social needs, and social taboos: why some epochs and states are more prone to inventions and creativity then others?

13. Ethics and inventions: what is patentable and what not from the point of view of morality?

14. The economics of inventions

15. Kinetic sculptures, light machines of László Moholy-Nagy, and modern Virtual Reality: arts and technological advances. A visit to the exhibition “Art and Design in Central and Northern Europe, 1880 to the Present”, Harvard Busch-Reisinger Museum

16. Art and technology in La Tour Eiffel

17. Musical instruments evolution and technology

18. The style of invention descriptions: specific organization patterns, phraseology, and wording (US and European patent offices styles)

19. Applying for patents: an almost “mystic initiation” like procedure?

20. XIX century fiction and technical innovation – links with the industrial revolution?

II. Activities List (according to statute)

1. The Society will organize seminars or lectures to assess the technical creativity and do a market analysis for previously issued patents in the literature; such exercises are to offer students a “hands-on approach” to understanding patents, feasibility, discerning between different levels of creativity, and evaluate commercial viability. Strong understanding of these concepts and of the ways to manipulate and articulate these concepts to specific examples are important in raising the chances of successful student patent applications and creative industrial and commercial thinking.

2. The Society encourages student meetings with members of the Harvard University Office of Technology Development (O.T.D.) and faculty members who have experience with patents. O.T.D. support could be crucial to teach students on how to make successful patent applications, not only from a technical point of view, but also from a commercial point of view.

3. The Society will invite senior sociologists, psychologists, business representatives, engineers, inventors, venture capitalists and other professionals to deliver seminars and lectures on topics related to creativity and inventions.

4. Also invited to meetings and seminars will be alumni who distinguished themselves in creative works of any kind, including but not limited to commercial, organizational, technical, and scientific creativity. Such alumni will be invited to act as honorary advisors of the Society, and present their work as invited lecturers.

5. The Society will make efforts to help with peer advice any fellow student regarding their questions about patent applications, offering basic orientation and information concerning their patent applications for student members who already learned about patents. Non-disclosure-agreements (N.D.A.) will be signed prior to discussions, if case will be. For this purpose, an officer or a member of the Society shall be available in a designated office (if the case), preferably one hour per day.

6. The Society will make efforts to help with peer advice any fellow student regarding their questions about patent applications, offering basic orientation and information concerning their patent applications for student members who already learned about patents. NDA agreements will be signed prior to discussions, if case will be. For this purpose, an officer or a member of the Society shall be available in a designated office (if the case), preferably one hour per day.

7. Whenever possible, the Society will make efforts to exchange experience and coorganize joint workshops with student societies with similar purpose from other Boston area universities.

8. The Society will make efforts to organize trips to invention fairs and exhibitions, especially in the Boston area.

9. The society will make efforts to coordinate brief volunteer trips of society members to Boston-area high schools, to present concepts related to creativity and inventions to school students.

10. Seminars, lectures, and other meetings may be organized as frequently as needed.