This year the theme of World Intellectual Property Day is “Women and IP: Accelerating innovation and creativity.” Clarivate helps companies accelerate innovation, achieve long-term growth and realize sustainable success. We are happy to continue the global celebration of World IP Day by spotlighting our women IP experts, whose ingenuity and talent pave the way to major breakthroughs. Here is the story of Rosemary Bassilakis, Service Operations Associate Director at Clarivate.
Finding passion in providing solutions to fuel innovation
Deep expertise and experience in science can lead to a successful career in the intellectual property (IP) industry. Rosemary Bassilakis walked down this path which she describes as “quite organic and fortuitous.”
After 15 years as a research associate in the laboratory, her passion for designing and building research equipment, conducting experiments and interpreting data evolved and she transitioned into a patent research position outside the lab. This was a challenging shift for Rosemary – made more complex by embarking on another very important role in the middle of a career change, the one of a mother. In doing so, she demonstrated strong will and determination can balance the best of both worlds.
Now, 20 years later, Rosemary is an established Associate Director of Service Operations at Clarivate with three grown children.
What Rosemary finds most rewarding in her role at Clarivate is the opportunity to collaborate and find efficient and effective solutions to answer customers’ strategic questions. These answers ultimately help her customers optimize their IP processes, maximize efficiency and accelerate innovation.
As Rosemary perceives it, the global patent world is vast, messy and quite challenging to make sense of. Nevertheless, she reflects that, “I am part of an amazing team that captures, structures and analyzes Clarivate market-leading patent data to inform clients of critical details: the who, what, when, where and why in terms of innovation in their technology domains. The clarity and insight we provide gives our customers historical and directional perspectives which serve as the underpinning of strategy. Strategy stimulates creativity and accelerates innovation.”
Gender equality and diversity key to lighten up the future of the IP industry
Rosemary firmly believes that many women are still overshadowed by male colleagues in areas of innovation and IP creation adding that, in her opinion, there are a lot more women impacting the IP world than is reflected in today’s patent ownership figures.
Despite an increasing number of women graduates with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degrees, only 16.5% of inventors named on international patent applications are women, according to research from the Clarivate patent analytics team.
“It is time for women to move out of the shadows and into the innovation spotlight. Diverse groups of people work together not only to find the best answers, but to find them faster.”
“To find innovative solutions to the complex and pressing challenges that humankind is facing today, we need a village, one with gender equality and diversity.”
Rosemary believes that as more women pursue STEM degrees and work in the IP industry, this will further contribute to breaking deep gender stereotypes. The future she desires for the IP world will be the reflection of gender equality not only in terms of patent ownership but also in terms of the number of executive positions held by women and the complete omission of pay gaps.
As a dedicated partner in providing IP services that elevate customers’ ideas and sustainable success, Rosemary sees an incredible opportunity for gender diversity within the IP industry for continual learning, creation and collaboration.
“To the women seeking an IP career, please know, you are enough.”
“Be resilient. Be bold with your ideas, your voice and your leadership. We need your active participation not only to reach the world’s innovative potential but also to pave the road for the next generation of women innovators.”
Join us in celebrating World IP Day and read more from our blog series on Clarivate women experts.
To learn how our experts help you maximize your IP potential, check our IP services or contact us.
