Professor of Innovation Engineering
Academic Division: Manufacturing and Management
Telephone: +44 1223 3 38083
Email: ft263@cam.ac.uk
Research interests
Research at the Innovation and IP Management (IIPM) lab focuses on two priority areas:
1. Strategic IP management for effective innovation processes
We focus on IP issues that are of strategic relevance for technology-based firms, e.g. within R&D activities, innovation processes but also in corporate strategy and decision making. Our research focuses on IP management in the context of emerging technologies, particularly those that help address global challenges, such as climate change, achieving sustainable development goals (SDG), and accelerating sustainability transitions.
2. New technologies for reinventing IP management
Technologies underpinning IP management have changed drastically over the recent decades with patent data being digitized and the continuous development of increasingly sophisticated software solutions for analyzing and visualizing IP data. This has just been the beginning and we are at a tipping point for how IP management is being handled. Technologies such as AI, deep and machine learning, and natural language processing have been adopted in other domains already to a much more sophisticated level than for IP analytics. Technologies, such as blockchain (and distributed ledger technologies) may contribute to the digitization of licensing transactions and the automation of complex royalty payment streams. We are interested to better understanding the business cases and models for those and other technologies and contributing to the development of such solutions that help to "reinvent" IP management.
Other positions
Frank is a governing body fellow and Director of Studies for MET students at Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Biography
Frank is Professor of Innovation Engineering at the University’s Department of Engineering, where he leads the Innovation and Intellectual Property Management (IIPM) laboratory. He serves as President of the EPIP (European Policy for Intellectual Property) association and is departmental editor for IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. Frank is affiliated with the Cambridge Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL).
Frank holds a Master of Arts (MA) degree from the University of Cambridge, a Doctoral degree (Dr rer pol) in economics and social sciences from Hamburg University of Technology (Germany), a Master of Science (MSc) degree from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) and a German Diplom degree (Dipl-Ing oec.) in industrial engineering and management.
Department role and responsibilities
Frank is course director for the Manufacturing Engineering Tripos (MET) Part IIB.