Should intellectual property be a real concern for a business embarking in workplace literacy training?
Yes, absolutely it should. Often as a provider working in partnership with a business, we have access to information about business processes which is extremely sensitive. It is common practice to sign a confidentiality agreement with businesses when we start working together.
The other aspect of this which is equally valid concerns the ownership of teaching and learning materials created. Again the idea of partnership is important. As a provider, we bring expertise and previous experience from other contexts where we have worked, however, if materials are developed with the input of people from the business where we are currently working, the business clearly has a degree of ownership of these materials too and a say in how that IP is managed.
This means that the business has access to use them for their purposes – it’s part of the footprint we want to leave behind. If the materials are highly contextualised to their operations the business may well want to manage how the provider uses them with other businesses … and of course as a provider, we’re interested in what happens to them too!
