Dr. Frank Wan began his sharing on the concept of Innovation. Innovation does not only mean creating new ideas, but also turning them into money and wealth. People have to understand how to use intellectual property (IP) rights to translate creative ideas and innovative invention into money. Dr. Wan then explained intellectual property can be divided into two groups: 1. industry property (includes patents for inventions, trademarks and industrial designs – which require commercial exploitation and usually with registration of rights) 2. copyrights (includes literary and artistic works with no commercial exploitation or registration).

Dr. Wan then talked about patent, which is a useful tool for IP protection but involves a long and complex process. With the recent hot discussion on the historical Man-versus-machine match between Lee Sedol, a Go World champion and Google’s AlphaGo, Dr. Wan concluded his workshop by using AlphaGo as an example of software patent and how Google uses patent to protect the IP of their artificial intelligence machine.