Hey everyone! This is my twentieth IEOR 190G Blog Post.

In this last blog post I will be discussing the value that I gained from taking this class. Now apart from the value added from the social-media tools that we used throughout the course of the semester that I discussed in my last blog post, I can proudly say IEOR 190G taught me a lot of material that will stick with me for a long time.

Nowadays everyone has heard of the word "patent", but knowing more about patents than "its that thing where you get to call something yours and sue people for using it" is relatively uncommon. I signed up for this course because I have a great interest in entrepreneurial ideas or solutions and I wanted to be more educated on patents and Intellectual Property as they relate to products in general. This course gave me a lot of insight pertaining to those topics and even if I may not be able to write an approvable patent application entirely by myself, I learnt a lot.

From learning the basics of how to read the actual document, to strategizing ways to protect oneself from Patent Troll litigation IEOR 190G made me familiar with all aspects of the patent process from the submission of the application to infringement litigation. Now I by no means plan to become a Patent Lawyer, and if I did then this would be the wrong course to take, but I do aspire to run my own business, a business whose success might very well gravitate around a solution or service that I wouldn't want my competitors to offer.

Following this course, I am even more convinced than I was at its start that being educated about the tradeoffs that a patent present you is essential when dealing with any form of Intellectual Property. Knowing the value added of keeping an invention a trade secret versus the cost of competitors using your inventions before you can claim ownership was specifically enlightening to me... especially in a world where everyone wants you to sign non-disclosure agreements but few agree!

I plan to use the knowledge that I learned in this class to make more informed business decisions, whether they regard my own intellectual property or my employer's. After having taken this class I will also be able to have fruitful conversations with patent lawyers and experts without the fear of feeling exploited or pushed around.

Lastly, from a more overarching point of view, I feel like IEOR 190G might have slightly changed my paradigm regarding originality of work. I have always been a stickler for originality being very biased against those who copy, however seeing how non-obvious use of prior arts truly can produce novel, original and useful inventions might have changed my mind. In today's "remix" culture where infinite information is at our fingertips and new inventions pop up every day, I feel that the most wonderful solutions build off the combination of more pre-existing entities whether we are talking about the Apple Watch or Bob Dylan's music.

As you may have inferred, IEOR 190G taught me a lot this semester and I could be more thankful to Prof. Lavian for teaching the class in the manner that he did. If you are interested in intellectual property, being an entrepreneur, or even simply dealing with new inventions, I highly recommend that you take this course.

As per usual feel free to view the video below for a discussion on the above.

On that note I thank you all for reading my blog posts and I wish you all the best for your futures.

Hey everyone! This is my nineteenth IEOR 190G Blog Post.

It has been a great semester, but it has come to an end and it is now time to reflect on our time together. In this first blog post I am going discuss Collaborative Social-Media Learning.

In this class we used a lot of social-media tools. From these very blog posts, to our youtube channels to our twitter accounts, we have experimented with pretty much every type of platform. This definitely has benefits the first of which is giving us familiarity with the status quo.

Personally, I am not very up-to-date when it comes to internet presence. I have a Facebook page which I barely use and an email address. When I had to make a twitter account for this class, I finally learnt how to use it. Granted, not know what "tweet" or "retweet" meant prior to a couple of weeks ago is totally my fault and problem, but nonetheless IEOR 190G brought me up to date with today's status quo -- currently having 284 million users, you need to know what Twitter is and how it works.

I have always been one to stay away from social media, afraid of putting my information on the web but something Prof. Lavian said during the semester resonated within me:

"You should be the one in control of what your internet presence looks like, not other people".

This convinced me to make a twitter account and using it for this class has been really cool! It instantly connects you to millions of other users with similar interests and many of my tweets were favorited by users like Braun US and Barrel On. I also found twitter to be very useful when used in the classroom as it helped highlight what my peers felt were important concepts, especially during Efrat Kasznik's guest lecture.

The weekly blog posts and youtube videos were something a was a little bit more used to doing as IEOR 190E, the mobile app challenge lab used a similar format. Blogging really helps to organize your thoughts especially when you also record a video as you are revising what you are going to publish multiple times with each revision helping to tie up loose ends and develop more understanding.

I think that this teaching style can be very beneficial for classes whose material in very current. IEOR 190G's material is exactly that: current. With most of our assignments being based off of our own research and current articles Prof. Lavian shared with us, the collaborative social-media nature of our homework not only forced me to be more aware of current events, but also opened my ears to other current information that my classmates found. Oftentimes, the arguments that people made in their blog post were repetitive, but the few who took an opposing or untraditional stance really made my "gears turn" and it is those posts that I enjoyed reading the most.

To this end, I would highly recommend that professors use blog post more frequently in subject matters that are relevant to current events, and more importantly, get the rest of the class to comment on each other's posts as that is where I gained the most value.

One way that I would improve this way of learning could be to find a platform that would allow all of the students to sign up as a class with individual profiles, kind of like a group, to allow for easier navigation to all of my peers' pages as going back and forth between the google spreadsheet made it easy to lose track of whose blogs I had visited and whose not yet.

That's all for this post and stay tuned for my last post coming up.
As always feel free to watch the video below for a discussion on the above.