Fusion › Curriculum › EPOM 410
Intellectual Property Management and Opportunity Assessment
The engineering entry point into the Fusion method. Students meet the challenges and opportunities of developing intellectual property from early discovery through the clinic and the market, worked here against neuromodulation technology.
- Term
- Fall 2026
- Credits
- 3
- Format
- Online, asynchronous
- 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 happens between an early discovery and a product in the market.
Specifically, the course develops the ability to value a technological advance holistically. A complete valuation extends beyond scientific efficacy 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.
EPOM 410 is offered through the Division of Engineering Leadership and Professional Practice as an elective in the Case School of Engineering's online master's programs, and is delivered entirely online. Lectures and materials are released on a schedule and worked through asynchronously, so students in different time zones take the course over the semester without a fixed meeting time. Students work in teams, and the class itself is virtual.
Engineers are usually closest to the invention and furthest from the decision about what happens to it. This course gives them the vocabulary and the analytical habits to take part in that decision on equal footing.
Technology focus: neuromodulation
EPOM 410 works neuromodulation, a field in which Northern Ohio holds unusual depth: 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, and a cluster of companies built on that work.
The domain also poses distinctive commercialization problems. Many discoveries concern the therapeutic effect of stimulating a precise anatomical target while offering little patentable ground around the device itself, the leads and pulse generators, or the system dynamics needed for a marketable product. Teams work that problem by examining multiple commercialization strategies, partnering potential, and the acquisition or development of competing component technologies.
Few innovations in this field arrive as an integrated product, so commercialization demands attention to the value chain and to component development. The path to market for an invasive device runs through extensive regulatory review, which cannot begin without early indications of safety and efficacy.
Fusion may run more than one technology focus in parallel across its schools. Neuromodulation and regenerative medicine differ completely in scientific substance. What carries across every Fusion course is the interdisciplinary approach and the skills needed to assess and commercialize a new technology.
Place in the sequence
EPOM 410 is the engineering entry to the fall sequence. Two themes run through every Fusion course: interdisciplinarity, and the skills needed to assess and commercialize a new technology. EPOM 410 builds those skills through needs analysis, intellectual property strategy, market landscaping, economic modeling, and integrated opportunity assessment, worked against neuromodulation. The fall core course, RGME 467, carries those themes further: it adds commercialization transactions and licensing, and its teams work a set of newly disclosed inventions in a single field. None of the Fusion courses repeats another.
It pairs 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.