Habituating Students to IPR Questions During Creative Project Work

Ville Isom

ott

onen and Tommi K

arkk

ainen

Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyv

askyl

a, Finland

Keywords:

Intellectual Property Rights, Project-Based, Creativity.

Abstract:

Intellectual property rights (IPR) constitute a topic that is unavoidably encountered in digitalizing learning

environments but that has received little attention as a separate educational research topic. In a project course

context where students ideate and implement open data-themed projects, and hence IPR questions are highly

relevant, we have learned that students readily perceive this matter as a side topic and tackle it without much

deliberation. To improve students’ awareness of IPR questions, we modiﬁed our course arrangements. This

article analyzes and discusses students’ responses to IPR in this setting. We found that students consider

IPR a challenge, and we argue that they must be “habituated” to think over this matter. The temporariness,

incompleteness, and potential humor of educational projects constrain students’ interest in IPR, while the

perceived relevance of a project topic increases their interest. Students altogether appreciate that IPR questions

are raised and need to be agreed on within teams.

1 INTRODUCTION

The computing profession comprises several aspects

that are referred to as professional skills. We fo-

cus on intellectual property (IP), which has received

fairly little attention as a separate educational research

topic. This topic is, in fact, inherently challenging.

As noted by Bach et al. (2010), in the classical cre-

ative industry intellectual property rights (IPR) have a

strategic but controversial role: both individuals and

companies prefer strong IPR, whereas creative com-

munities call for weak IPR to allow for ﬂexible recre-

ation (e.g., new music or video games).

The context of our work is project-based learn-

ing, which has a century-old documented history (Kil-

patrick, 1918). In our ﬁeld of computer science and

software engineering, various project course mod-

els were already suggested decades ago (Shaw and

Tomayko, 1991). Capstone projects or senior de-

sign courses constitute an essential part of many com-

puter science and engineering programs, which is il-

lustrated in taxonomic works (Fincher et al., 2001;

Hoffman, 2014). We focus on a bachelor-level project

course where students innovate a software product us-

ing open resources, open data and open APIs (Ap-

plication Programming Interfaces). This emphasis on

creation based on available resources links with the

concept of open innovation proposed by Chesbrough

(2003). In a systematic literature review on this con-

cept, IP was mentioned both as one of the main trends

and as a popular keyword within the open innovation

literature, while student innovation did not receive at-

tention (Hossain et al., 2016). Hence, within the open

innovation research paradigm, the student setting with

regard to IPR is a novel domain.

In our experience, project-based learning in which

students collaborate with industry can make IPR

questions a relatively easy topic for students, as of-

ten such courses operate using university-made agree-

ment templates requiring not much more than signa-

tures from the students. That is, the topic of intel-

lectual property is raised to ensure the protection of

customer rights. When we devised a project-based

course based fully on students’ own ideation (no cus-

tomers involved), we noticed that IPR questions con-

stituted a “necessary evil” and that efforts had to be

taken to raise students’ attention (Isom

ott

onen and

arkk

ainnen, 2016).

In an open, student group innovation context, one

needs to manage IPR to prevent any concerns about

students not submitting their part of the project work

(Abdelkaﬁ, 2011) and in order not to suppress cre-

ative work (Kiili et al., 2012). As noted by Fuller

et al. (2010), students as software developers may be

willing to rashly use software regardless of licensing

violations but be much more strict when considering

ownership of their own programming contributions.

Hence, the use of open resources in conjunction with

Isomöttönen, V. and Kärkkäinen, T.

Habituating Students to IPR Questions During Creative Project Work.

DOI: 10.5220/0006284800950102

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2017) - Volume 2, pages 95-102

ISBN: 978-989-758-240-0

self-made deliverables can create a tension that leads

to an overemphasis on one’s own achievements. In

this article, we study students’ responses to IPR in

the context of creative group-based project work.

2 IP IN STUDENTS’

COURSEWORK

The recommendations and lessons learned relating to

IPR issues in capstone projects have been strongly

based on protecting the rights of industrial partners

(e.g. Gorka et al., 2007). The importance of IPR is-

sues is thus well recognized in project courses with

explicit external customers. Under such conditions,

intellectual property is negotiated and agreed between

the university, individual students, and the customer

organization (Isom

ott

onen and K

arkk

ainen, 2008; Pil-

skalns, 2009; Vanhanen et al., 2012).

Many organizations implement several kinds of

customer projects in such a way that students can

make a selection and be allocated to the projects based

on their opinions about IPR (Goldberg, 2004; Vallino,

2014; Alexander et al., 2014). As exempliﬁed in the

study by Vallino (2014), customer collaboration may

take a form of an open source project, a project where

IP is fully granted to the customer, a project where

only particular rights to use the project outcome are

granted to the customer (students keeping their IPR),

and a project where no rights are granted to external

parties. Sometimes IP transfer is organized in such a

way that students grant IPR to the university, which

then signs them off to the customer (Goldberg, 2004).

IP transfer is often seen as the key factor in be-

ing able to recruit companies as project sponsors and

customers (Todd and Magleby, 2005; Henson, 2010;

Warnick and Todd, 2011). Accordingly, IPR are often

straightforwardly transferred to the companies, with

other options mentioned in a sense of a backup-plan

(Alexander et al., 2014). In a study by Stearns et al.

(2003), there was no procedure for managing students

who declined to transfer IP; such students simply con-

tinued working in the capstone sequence. Generally,

IPR questions in customer collaboration are noted to

be potentially difﬁcult to manage (Gorka et al., 2007).

A different approach is found in studies drawing

on student creativity. In the context of entrepreneurial

capstone, Shartrand and Weilerstein (2011) posit that

the entrepreneurial element transfers the usual em-

phasis on customer and university polices to the stu-

dent team as to IPR. They stress the importance of

educational possibilities to understand and learn fun-

damentals of IP in a real context and related to self-

generated artifacts, as students are then motivated

and encouraged to pursue projects beyond the pro-

vided courses—their program offers students oppor-

tunities to advance the work initiated during the cap-

stone projects.

Similarly, in the study by Silva et al. (2009), which

focused on an entrepreneurial practical course, a ma-

jor argument to ask students to reﬂect explicitly on

intellectual property was its motivational inﬂuence

on their creative work. They asked students to re-

view patent registers to help them see how novel their

ideas were, and they even encouraged students to ﬁle

patents. The authors argue that such procedures are

educationally valuable, preparing students for their

professional future.

Yet another entrepreneurial project course for un-

dergraduate students is presented by Pilskalns (2009).

As with our own course arrangements, important con-

tent was provided to students in the form of small

lectures, with one of the topics dealing with owner-

ship and intellectual property related to project deliv-

erables. The operational model in this case report,

however, was based on establishing a student com-

pany around a lecture-deﬁned novel software product

whose IPR agreements were related to ensuring prof-

itability for an external investor.

Empirical ﬁndings on students’ perceptions are

found in a small survey by Kilamo et al. (2012) who

explored students’ perceptions of IPR during projects

implemented in a hatchery (Demola). In this setting,

students and companies can collaborate on student-

ideated projects. The authors noticed that students

paid little attention to IPR during their projects, which

corresponds with our prior experiences. The study by

Silvernagel et al. (2009) also highlights challenges,

reporting that it is not clear that students or faculty

members are willing to openly disclose their project

ideas, in particular if they consider their ideas to be

of value. On the other hand, the study by Silva et al.

(2009) reveals that students consider the topic of IPR

to be important. In a post-survey of 42 former stu-

dents from their course, over 90% of the respondents

considered understanding of IPR issues to be crucial

or important to solving business problems and taking

advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities.

In summary, the role of an external customer, who

typically pulls IPR from a student group, could be

replaced by the requirement of the group to deeply

consider IPR with respect to their own deliverables

potentially having business value and/or societal im-

pact. On the other hand, the literature indicates that

students regard the topic of IPR as important but may

pay little attention to it. Further, individuals collab-

orating on a shared project may demonstrate reserve

when it comes to disclosing their own project ideas.

CSEDU 2017 - 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

3 THE PRESENT CONTEXT

We devised a project course where students utilize

open resources. The course is a 12-week (5 ECTS

credits) challenge where small groups ideate and im-

plement a software product using self-selected tech-

nologies. Each student group is coached on a weekly

basis by a teacher focusing on group processes and

software processes and a senior student providing

technical advise. The course begins with a lecture

on group and software processes and a brieﬁng on

web development with open data examples. Students

present their project ideas after three weeks and then

continue with the product design and implementation.

During the last third of the project, an expert lecture

on “immaterial rights in programmers’ work” is pro-

vided to facilitate students’ within-team agreements

on IPR and their work with existing resources. The

projects are ﬁnally presented in an open-day event

where students demonstrate and let the audience test

their products. The audience consists of staff mem-

bers and other students in the department.

The course is very intensive and utilizes dialog as

its main pedagogic tool. The main learning goal is

conceptual learning about group work and software

processes in realistic conditions enabled by creative

open data projects. The course naturally introduces

students to a topical theme, use of open resources, as

well as reinforcing their technical skills. The course

is for third-year students but is also occasionally

taken by second-year and fourth-year students. The

course arrangements and completed projects are de-

scribed more thoroughly elsewhere (Isom

ott

onen and

arkk

ainen, 2015; Isom

ott

onen and K

arkk

ainnen,

2016).

When we previously merely guided students to

consider IPR within their groups, we noticed that

students gave little attention to the topic, cursorily

attaching licenses they might know to their project

outcomes at the very last minute. In our view, the

course lacked professionalism, and students needed

to be made more aware of IPR when undertaking cre-

ative work in a collaborative setting. To raise stu-

dents’ awareness, we designed an agreement template

to be used by each student group (Isom

ott

onen and

arkk

ainnen, 2016). The agreement is made between

each student in the group and the university. The uni-

versity signature shows students that the university

does not use the students’ work outside the agreement

and, importantly, makes the IPR questions formal and

noticeable to the students.

The agreement is applied in two phases. In the

ﬁrst phase, at the beginning of the project, students

sign an agreement text by which they make a com-

mitment to agree on the IPR in their group by the end

of the project. Each student in a particular project is

then able to trust that IPR are addressed within the

group. In the second phase, during the last third of

the project, students sign another document, an at-

tachment to the former, where they announce the IPR

related to their project outcomes. Usually this means

announcing an open license that they have attached

to their product. We have noticed that it is natural to

make ﬁnal decisions on the IPR during the last third

of the project, as by then the students are able to form

a realistic picture of the project outcomes.

4 THE STUDY

We present a thematic analysis of students’ responses

to IPR questions after our attempts to raise students’

awareness of IPR by the agreement practice. The

study reﬂects a step in an action research project

where actions taken are put under validation and re-

ﬂected on. It must be emphasized that validation here

signiﬁed an aim to describe the phenomenon instead

of controlled experimentation. The resultant cate-

gories on the students’ reactions to IPR can inform

a follow-up quantitative study on the relative impor-

tance of the categories.

The data used were the students’ reviews of IP in

their personal learning reports prepared in the end of

the autumn 2015 course. These reports were received

from the whole course population (N=21). The anal-

ysis followed data-driven (inductive) content analy-

sis. We began by extracting IP-related extracts from

the learning reports. Thereafter, the ﬁrst author per-

formed a thematic analysis, the outcomes of which

were reviewed by the second author for reaching an

agreement. Similarities and differences in the data

indicated a set of categories. Finally, the resultant

categories were arranged into a holistic “display,” as

shown in Figure 1; A similar analytic approach is

described by many, for instance, by Attride-Stirling

(2001), who suggests that themes discovered in the

data are developed into “thematic networks.”

Our data concerns only single course instance and

yielded a single patterned display. In this connection,

it must be stressed that the current study is under-

pinned by our previous improvement efforts on the

same matter (IPR) and context; In improving educa-

tion as an action research project, continuity in the re-

search process, such that one and the same researchers

stay together, is an important validity aspect (Melrose,

2001).

Habituating Students to IPR Questions During Creative Project Work

5 STUDENTS’ RESPONSES TO

IPR

This section reviews the students’ responses to IPR

questions. The main themes of the thematic analysis

are presented in Sections 5.1–5.7 and summarized in

Section 5.8.

5.1 Temporariness

Looking at the students’ responses to IPR, we noticed

that an educational project is readily perceived to be

a temporary organization, with this temporariness re-

ducing students’ genuine interest in the project out-

comes and related IPR issues:

I was not interested in IPR questions during

the course, as I had no plans to further develop

our product, and the rights to it were then not

interesting.

However, the same student continues:

As for the future, it was useful to explore the

different licenses and ﬁgure out their purpose.

The same contradiction, albeit in a milder form, is il-

lustrated by the below quotation from another student:

Although it may seem a bit useless to consider

IPR on the project outcome in the context of

a short-term student project such as this, IPR

questions play such a big role in the software

business that it is good to start pondering them

at this point.

These contradictions reveal that the attribute of tem-

porariness “pushes” students’ interest away from a

matter that they consider will be important in the fu-

ture.

5.2 Incompleteness

The intensive 12-week course yields useful and illus-

trative prototypes, although of course many parts of

such prototyped products should be refactored in or-

der to become technically sound products. Accord-

ingly, students refer to the incompleteness of their

product as a factor affecting the selection of a licence,

which, in this case, can simply be very open in nature:

We had no problems in selecting the license

within our group, as we knew that the quality

of the code was not that good. So we selected

a very open license, as the whole thing would

have to be implemented afresh if one wanted

to make it a really usable [deployable] prod-

uct. [...] Well it [the code] was not that bad

nor unreadable, but reworking it would help

in ﬁguring out what we were actually doing.

We should note here that creative product develop-

ment has been associated with continuous prototyp-

ing. Silva et al. (2009), who also implement a course

drawing on student creativity, aptly state that “the

more you build prototypes, the more you understand

the product.” Our experiences align with the need for

continuous prototyping, and we must place more em-

phasize on this feature of software process to the stu-

dents.

5.3 Humor in Project Topic

Creative topics may turn out to be humorous in nature,

which may, however engaging they may be, lead stu-

dents to develop only a minor interest in IPR. Educa-

tionally, as we emphasize conceptual learning about

group processes and software processes as the key

learning goals, such topics have worked out well, and

we have not blocked student creativity in this regard.

The quotation below nonetheless illustrates a con-

strained reaction to IPR with respect to such a project

topic:

On my part, licensing questions were hardly

at all relevant, as I thought from the beginning

that our project was, as you may ﬁnd in its

topic, made up so much with tongue in cheek

and a twinkle in the eye that I didn’t even want

to think about immaterial rights. [...] For me

the project was about implementing a jolly

idea, for which reason I felt up to doing the

project and avoided boredom.

Although we guide students to consider a target group

for their projects, the quotation suggests that this must

be particularly emphasized for humorous project top-

ics. Students should perceive their project, however

humorous, to be relevant outside their own project

scope.

5.4 Perceived Relevance

A project topic perceived to be relevant (serviceable,

of real value) increases student interest in IPR, a fac-

tor counteracting the above constraining factors:

IPR questions did not really emerge in the dis-

cussions of the group. In the beginning, we

simply thought that if someone earned large

amounts of money with the product, the topic

would begin to make sense. At the end, the

group members, including me, pondered the

licensing much more. Especially because we

received a pat on the back for our project idea

and implementation. We ﬁnally selected the

AGP license instead of the MIT license.

CSEDU 2017 - 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

The quotation illustrates how students’ thinking con-

cerning IPR develops during projects, as they begin to

gradually picture the characteristics of the end prod-

uct. This observation matches our use of the two-

phased agreement practice. Moreover, the quotation

also illustrates how the student group considered sev-

eral licensing options when the project was perceived

to be relevant (not only the very concise and open

MIT license). As an interesting aside, the theme of

perceived relevance has emerged in the context of ed-

ucational projects with external customers as a fac-

tor affecting students’ opinions concerning potential

ﬁnancial compensation for their coursework (Heikki-

nen and Isom

ott

onen, 2015).

5.5 Uncertainty with a New and

Difﬁcult Topic

When students use a wide range of available resources

in their projects, uncertainty emerges:

The licensing thing was totally new to me. [...]

We had to be very careful with how to use In-

stagram and Twitter. The terms and conditions

were difﬁcult texts to read. We had to, for

instance, change our site appearance because

Twitter and Instagram required particular ap-

pearances and functionalities.

The uncertainty also relates to agreements within

teams:

Frankly, I am not sure if the licensing of our

work followed all the regulations. We spent

time on exploring the matter but we certainly

are not lawyers.

In a similar tone, another student states:

I have not needed to think over programming-

related immaterial rights before, in particu-

lar when work is done in a group and exist-

ing code is utilized. [...] The large number

of available licenses complicates the selection,

as many include only small adjustments com-

pared to the others. For this reason, we have

not reached a consensus in our group yet, at

the time I am writing this report.

5.6 Eye-opening toward Professionalism

A positive learning outcome is reﬂected in the transi-

tions from initially considering IPR as a useless topic

to seeing it as a necessary topic in professional prac-

tice:

Although the IPR questions were really alien

to me at ﬁrst and I regarded the whole topic as

useless, it was, after all, good that they were

raised. When programming code is created, it

is good to talk through who have the rights to

that code. [...] Now, being a bit more aware of

these things, I’ve been pondering questions re-

lated to immaterial and other rights as regards

programming and other functions of compa-

nies.

Another quotation reveals that students value being

awoken to the topic in order to avoid being acciden-

tally negligent:

IPR questions were fairly strange to me in

the context of computer science. I heard in-

teresting and important examples of how you

should act depending on the situation [your

aims] during the lecture. You easily ignore

these topics but after hearing of them, I cer-

tainly do not leave anything [IP related] un-

marked in any decent projects.

It should be noted that even in cases where we ob-

served a clear constraining factor, we ﬁnd students

anticipating that IPR will be generally an important

topic; see the latter two quotations in Section 5.1. The

student we quoted in Section 5.3 also concludes in

this manner:

I suppose I need to start thinking of these

questions [IPR] in the future.

Furthermore, we interpret the instances when stu-

dents kept on posing questions after the brieﬁng lec-

ture as indications of eye-opening:

After the license lecture, I was still unclear

about what open source code you can use and

how it should be marked in your own code if

you use it. It would be nice to receive further

clariﬁcation on how you can use open code

and what conventions are involved.

Students’ comments also reveal that they have

considered different options within their groups—a

desired learning outcome:

Our group selected GNU GPL 2.0 as the li-

cense, as we thought that it would be easier

to move from a stricter license to a more open

one, if we [later] wanted to do so. It is more

difﬁcult to tighten up an open one.

5.7 Within-team Fairness

Students value that IPR is raised as their group situa-

tion becomes clariﬁed from the perspective of owner-

ship:

Habituating Students to IPR Questions During Creative Project Work

I experienced the considerations on the rights

as useful because each group member pro-

duced a considerable amount of code into the

ﬁnal version and the work took a lot of time

from each of us. Each of us could further de-

velop the software, for what reason it is good

that things [IPR] have been agreed on.

This quote highlights the experience of fairness

within a group, which is reinforced through making

an agreement on immaterial rights.

5.8 Summary Pattern

The course seems to “expose” students to the topic of

IPR instead of “integrating” previously learned items,

as is the case with many other skills involved in the

course. Students’ comments reveal that the topic of

IPR was previously strange to them and that this ex-

posure to the topic initiated their knowledge and in-

terest. Our interpretation is that this eye-opening ex-

perience counteracted the frustrations caused by their

uncertainties about a novel and difﬁcult topic. The

constraining factors related to the temporariness and

incompleteness of educational projects. These factors

were nevertheless counteracted when the students no-

ticed that they had ideated and implemented a use-

ful, serviceable project. Finally, as course providers,

we regard the “within-team fairness” outcome as a

professional condition that we sought to introduce

through the agreement practice described in Section

3. Figure 1 conceptualizes results into pull and push

factors. For instance, issues such as temporariness

“push” students’ interest away from the matter, while

a project topic perceived to be relevant “pulls” their

interest back. Students’ responses may also vary

within teams: one team member may consider fair-

ness in terms of rights to reuse the code (“pull”),

whereas another one straightforwardly shows lowered

interest in IP due to the temporary and humorous na-

ture of the project (“push”).

6 DISCUSSION

This paper has reported on students’ responses to IPR

during creative collaborative work. Based on our ob-

servations concerning the initial orientations in the

course, the push factors (e.g., temporariness) that con-

strain students’ interest in IPR may be rooted in a

broad educational challenge: how students perceive

being in formal education. The third-year project

students have principally attended big introductory

classes after their schooling background. Their per-

ceptions of themselves as potentially self-directed ac-

tive agents may be constrained, and their orientations

reﬂect a mode of being where they expect course

providers to instruct them in what to do and where

they principally work for credits. We have accord-

ingly overheard and witnessed in the end-of-course

learning reports students being overwhelmed by the

very open course assignment and the active role re-

quired, which we illustrate with a quotation below:

The only thing addressed during the course,

in which I did not really develop myself, was

ideating. Our group had severe difﬁculties

with ideating, which can be seen in the out-

come. We could not come up with a good idea

and a topic everyone was interested in. Many

courses do not at all require student ideation,

which is a bit negative [unfortunate] thing. We

have learned to work on predeﬁned topics or

problems, which is likely to cause passivity

and makes ideating painful. You do not learn

to ideate just like that but, encouraged by this

course, I started to think over this matter more

closely and will work on the matter somehow

in the future.

We have fortunately observed transformations (as in

the quotation above), which the ﬁrst author has re-

ported earlier (Isom

ott

onen, 2014) and which also

emerged in relation to IPR questions (see Section 5.6).

Re-observing such transformations suggests a useful

hidden curriculum for early curriculum project-based

courses, one which reinforces a perception of formal

education as a meaningful activity. Generally, project

work emphasizing complicated problems of open na-

ture has been argued to be suitable for late curricula,

as by then students have developed needed levels of

self direction (Perrenet et al., 2000).

While the challenges observed may be rooted in

the features of the education system, we believe that

remedial actions can be taken. Our results suggest

that these actions should focus on increasing the per-

ceived relevance of projects. One action is to further

support the students’ creative processes at the begin-

ning of the course in order to avoid unreﬁned and

rashly decided project topics. We could announce

the ﬁrst two weeks of the course as a speciﬁc phase

dedicated only to ideation. Another action relates

to the previously discussed concern that educational

projects without an explicit customer may turn out

“ﬂat” in the end (Isom

ott

onen and K

arkk

ainen, 2015),

as students notice that their efforts are not deployed

in real use. We could introduce more publicity into

students’ coursework by building a portal where stu-

dents can deploy their prototypes together with links

to source code in public repositories (e.g., GitHub).

This would make the possibility of reuse not only the-

CSEDU 2017 - 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

100

eye-opening exposure

IPRs as an important

professional topic

fairness

temporariness

incompleteness

humor in project topic

diﬃculty/uncertainty

relevant project

PULL

PUSH

Figure 1: Results summarized as pull and push factors.

oretical but unlikely and likely. This action could be

accompanied with an expert lecture on entrepreneur-

ship provided by a carefully selected, inspiring en-

trepreneur alumnus.

An important educational question is also how

strictly students can and should be guided regarding

IPR. We have learned that interpreting data licenses

and terms and conditions is challenging for teachers

as well. From this perspective, we argue that students

must be “habituated” to the matter and advised that

addressing it is likely to “remain a challenge that must

be tackled as part of professional practice.” We thus

consider students’ increasing questioning induced by

the course to be a desired learning outcome (Section

5.6). That is, students become gradually more pre-

pared to encounter IPR questions.

In ACM/IEEE CS curriculum (2013), it is recom-

mended that professional practice should be taught

through a standalone course, while with a note that

a mere standalone course does not introduce the top-

ics in a context. Our observations indicate that even

when issues are raised within a context, students

must see the relevance to be interested. We conclude

that encountering IPR questions within contexts and

throughout the curriculum, as part of courses where

they are needed and relevant, is educationally beneﬁ-

cial.

Finally, we notice that the students’ responses to

IPR in terms of fairness in group situations (Section

5.7) align with our goal of teaching group work by

conceptualizing and communicating “justice in group

work” to the students (Isom

ott

onen, 2014). Thus, by

increasing attention to IPR we feel that we have better

incorporated a key educational attribute (justice) into

the course.

7 CONCLUSION

We conclude with two main points. First, to attract

students’ interest in IPR during creative project work,

they should perceive their projects as relevant. This

requirement relates to the problem of a “lack of con-

tinuation” in student-ideated projects, an issue sup-

ported by the literature (Pilskalns, 2009) and that we

can conﬁrm. We wish to note that affording stu-

dents with opportunities to continue their self-ideated

projects may be difﬁcult in computing curricula that

do not otherwise emphasize entrepreneurship. The re-

quirement of relevance also signiﬁes support for stu-

dents’ creative processes at the beginning of the in-

novation projects in order to guide students to select

topics they both perceive and can argue to be ser-

viceable. Second, due to student inexperience, we

stress that educators must take responsibility for rais-

ing IPR questions through sound procedures in order

to make learning environments professional spaces

that are able to support fairness in collaborative work.

A follow-up study should also continue to address

variation in students’ responses to IPR within teams

and how group phenomena such as the effects of ma-

jority affect IP decisions.

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