Closing The Gender Gap In STEM Inventions - A Conversation With Qualcomm’s EVP & President Of The Technology Licensing Business - Alex Rogers
By Carolina Milanesi
Originally published by Forbes
At the end of 2020, I had the opportunity to attend a fireside chat hosted by Invent Together, a coalition of organizations, universities, companies and other stakeholders focused on understanding and addressing the diversity gap in invention and patenting. The panelists very well represented all these stakeholders with Dr. Andrei Iancu, the then Director of USPTO. He serves as the principal advisor to the Secretary of Commerce on Domestic and International Intellectual Property Policy Matters, Senator Mazie Hirono, Hawaii's first female senator and the country's first Asian American woman senator and sponsor of the Idea Act, Dr. Lisa Cook, professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University, and one of the leading academics on race and gender gaps in patenting and their impact on the economy, Dr. Wendy Wintersteen, the 16th President of Iowa State University and the first woman to hold the title and Alex Rogers, Executive Vice President and President of Qualcomm Technology Licensing (QTL). The hour-long conversation covered many critical topics, from the potential loss in GDP caused by the lack of equal access to the innovation economy to the impact that diversity has on teams, the importance of fostering innovation and, of course, STEM education.
