Fusion — Curriculum — EPOM 410
Intellectual Property Management and Opportunity Assessment
The engineering entry point into the Fusion method. Students meet the challenges and opportunities encountered when developing meaningful intellectual property from the point of early discovery through to the clinic and the market — worked here against neuromodulation technology.
- Term
- Fall 2026
- Credits
- 3
- Technology focus
- Neuromodulation
- Program
- Engineering, Innovation Management & Leadership
- School
- Case School of Engineering
The course
The goal of this course is to address the issues that arise when commercializing scientific inventions, by exposing graduate students to what actually happens between an early discovery and a product in the market.
Specifically, the course develops the ability to value a technological advance holistically. Scientific efficacy is the entry ticket, not the answer. A complete valuation extends to patient and practitioner value propositions, legal and intellectual property protection, business modeling, potential market impacts, market competition, and the ethical, social, and healthcare-practitioner acceptance that ultimately governs adoption.
Engineers are usually closest to the invention and furthest from the decision about what happens to it. This course closes that distance — not by turning engineers into lawyers or financiers, but by giving them the vocabulary and the analytical habits to take part in the argument on equal footing.
Technology focus: neuromodulation
Where the medical-school sequence works regenerative medicine, EPOM 410 works neuromodulation — a field in which Northern Ohio holds unusual depth. The region carries world-class research across the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland FES Center, and the Advanced Platform Technology Center at the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center, alongside a cluster of companies built on that work.
The domain also poses commercialization problems found almost nowhere else, which is exactly why it teaches well. Many discoveries here concern the therapeutic effect of stimulating a precise anatomical target while offering little patentable ground around the device itself — the leads, the pulse generators — or the system dynamics needed to make a marketable product. Teams learn to work that problem: examining multiple commercialization strategies, partnering potential, and the acquisition or development of competing component technologies.
Two further constraints recur. Few innovations in this field arrive as an integrated product, so commercialization demands attention to the value chain and to component development. And the path to market for an invasive device runs through extensive regulatory review, which itself cannot begin without creative, persistent work to produce early indications of safety and efficacy.
In any given cycle Fusion may run more than one technology focus in parallel across its schools. The scientific substance differs completely between neuromodulation and regenerative medicine; the six-track analytical discipline applied to each is identical. That is the program's central claim, tested live every term.
Where it sits in the sequence
EPOM 410 is the engineering counterpart to the fall core course, RGME 467, and covers the same analytical ground: needs analysis, intellectual property strategy, market landscaping, economic modeling, commercialization transactions, and integrated opportunity assessment.
It pairs naturally with EPOM 412 in the same term, which takes the process of technology transfer as its explicit subject. Students continuing in the summer move to EPOM 411 and EPOM 413.