Virtual Village: Innovation at work
Village Virtuel : l’innovation « en marche »
M-M. Bernard , M. Fruhwirth (a),
C. de Mareuil Villette ( b)
a PACE 2000 International Foundation, Ottawa, Canada
b ICOSA—European Patent Attorneys, Paris, France
Received 4 October 2014; accepted 15 November 2014
KEYWORDS
Intellectual property rights; Virtual village; Intergenerational innovation; Telemedicine; Telementoring; Social relationships and e-health
Summary
Innovation is well at work when it reaches strong, on-going and diversified community support along with rigorous evaluations. PACE 2000, a foundation, favouring relationships between generations, created the ‘‘Virtual Village’’, connecting via videoconferencing, generations or groups of individuals who usually do not meet. It has evolved from social and cross-cultural ‘‘tele-encounters’’ starting in 1996 to innovative medico-economic and potential universal tools. The purpose of this review is to highlight how Intellectual/Industrial Property Rights (IPR) have played essential roles in the development and evolution of the Virtual Village since 1996. At least four types have been identified: 1- Promotion of early recognition of its inventions and programs; 2- Backing of on-going support and financing; 3- Enhanced compliance or early detection of non-compliance to its project developments and implementation protocols; 4- Definite lead into valuable Business Rights. Indeed, sponsors look for IPRs, as important assets that promote innovations. IPRs are also reassuring for stakeholders and are also incentives to secondary improvements by co-inventors. The ‘‘Virtual Village’’ innovations offer a good potential for a return on investments as it leads to the dissemination into diversified market ‘‘niches’’. From an initial purpose of ‘‘bringing happiness into the lives of every generation’’, the Virtual Village and its patented inventions that were geared at promoting relationships, have evolved into business partnership opportunities, be it in professional training and apprenticeship, in the e-health technologies sector, or in Education as well as in the Foreign Language Immersion Telementoring sector.
© 2014 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: mmbernard@outlook.com (M.-M. Bernard), mf@pace2000.org (M. Fruhwirth), cdm@icosa.fr (C. de Mareuil Villette).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurtel.2014.11.001
2212-764X/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.