The EIPIN Foundation builds on more than two decades of collaboration among Europe’s leading intellectual property research institutions. Its origins lie in the European Intellectual Property Institutes Network (EIPIN), an academic consortium established in 1999 to strengthen cooperation in intellectual property teaching, research and doctoral training across Europe. From the outset, EIPIN sought to overcome the fragmentation of European IP scholarship by creating a structured network through which leading universities and research institutes could collaborate on research, share teaching expertise, organise joint academic events and develop common approaches to doctoral education.  

 

Over time, EIPIN evolved into Europe’s most recognised networks in intellectual property law and policy. The consortium brought together institutions with internationally recognised expertise in patents, copyright, trade marks, design law, competition law and innovation policy. Through annual congresses, doctoral seminars, summer schools and collaborative research initiatives, the network fostered a generation of early-career researchers while strengthening intellectual exchange between legal scholars, economists, policy experts and practitioners. Its collaborative model demonstrated that many of the challenges posed by technological change and innovation could not be adequately addressed through isolated institutional research, but instead required sustained international and interdisciplinary cooperation.  

 

A major milestone in the network’s development was the launch of the EIPIN Innovation Society (EIPIN IS) project under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network programme. Running from 2017 to 2021, the project brought together five academic institutions and numerous non-academic partners to train a new generation of doctoral researchers capable of examining intellectual property as a complex adaptive system within the innovation lifecycle. Rather than treating IP solely as a legal regime, the programme integrated legal, economic, technological and policy perspectives to understand how intellectual property shapes innovation, investment and knowledge transfer. The project also introduced joint doctoral supervision, extensive secondments with partner organisations and multidisciplinary research addressing emerging technologies, digital markets, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and the governance of innovation.  

 

The success of EIPIN demonstrated both the value and the sustainability of long-term collaboration for academic research and training. As EU-funded projects reached their conclusion, participating institutions recognised the need for a permanent organisational structure capable of preserving the network’s accumulated expertise while expanding its activities beyond individual research grants. This led to the establishment of EIPIN as a European network of intellectual property scholars, supported by the EIPIN Foundation, as the institutional successor to the earlier EIPIN network. The new organisation provides a stable platform for collaborative research, doctoral education, policy engagement and international partnerships. It seeks to advance cutting-edge scholarship on intellectual property and innovation while continuing the network’s long-standing commitment to supporting early-career researchers and contributing evidence-based expertise to European and global innovation policy.