The second Young AIPPI Members Summit took place on 21 June!

The Young AIPPI Members Summit makes its return! With the success of the inaugural Summit in 2022, the Young Members of AIPPI came together virtually on 21 June 2023 for the 2^nd Young AIPPI Members Summit. The event was created exclusively for the Young AIPPI Members, with each attendee able to invite a friend along to participate – this year, we were overjoyed to welcome close to 90 attendees over the course of the day.

With a callout for speakers and programming ideas from the Young Member community, the Summit is a platform to enable the community to come together in a comfortable setting and listen to and support one another – speakers took up the challenge to hone their presentation skills amongst a like-minded audience, and the audience in turn could listen, learn, and share their ideas and thoughts with one another. The virtual feature enables any Young AIPPI Member to attend, as they will not be hampered by the costs to travel to a destination to attend an in-person event.

The Summit programme took place over the course of the entire day to enable participation from as much of the world as possible. There was a total of 4 plenary sessions, and 4 AIPPI Cafés – this allowed for a diverse programme, from the “listen and learn” feature of plenary sessions, to the “share and discuss” feature of the AIPPI Cafés. The sharing was informative, engaging, and well prepared – the speakers and facilitators took time to start from the ground up, introducing concepts and perspectives, and often challenged the thought process to thinking towards the future, as it is a future that we will all be living in. A snapshot of the topics for the day:

It was a delight to have such a diverse range of speakers and facilitators from the young member community, which included IP practitioners, in-house counsel, and government officials. It was heartwarming to see the dedication of the speakers and facilitators as some had to be awake before the sun rose, whilst others had to juggle multiple roles as they were also still doing their studies!

It is sincerely the hope that this young member community will continue to grow, in leaps and bounds, and that we continue to challenge and support each other – apart from the professional development of young members, we hope that opportunities for connections such as these will allow friendships to grow and blossom and will continue to flourish for decades to come. It is so encouraging to see more NRGs connecting with the Young AIPPI Advisory Committee to let us know that they have young members interested in participating with the work of the committee, and to arranging more events and opportunities for young members to connect in their pockets of the world!

So, what’s next? As the AIPPI World Congress heads to Istanbul in just a few short months, the Committee moves its sights towards the Young AIPPI Forum (an event within the Congress programme), with the Forum featuring learning and development opportunities, as well as the opportunity for the community to connect with each other in person!

Finally, in all things – gratitude. We continue to be incredibly grateful for the support and work of so many people, from the AIPPI Bureau, General Secretariat and the Events team, across to all the speakers who have volunteered their time and efforts to produce such high-quality content, and to the Young AIPPI Advisory Committee, who moderated and facilitated discussions for the day. And of course, to all the participants, who invested their time to be present, to participate and to make the event a successful one.

As always, we welcome all feedback and comments! Feel free to reach out to us at yac@aippi.org.