“Trust me guys, this nation has a talent” – Emma Arakelyan

On January 22, 2018, Armenia Startup Academy hosted the executive team of Orion Worldwide Innovations: Emma Arakelyan (CEO & Co-Founder, formerly of Accenture and EY), Anna Bennett (COO U.S. & Co-Founder), Polina Parusis (CFO & Co-Founder), Hakob Hakobyan (COO Armenia & Co-Founder), the team of BioNeex and Pro-IP with its members Vahe Movsisyan, a commercial lawyer specialized in IP, and Arsen Nagdalyan, an economist in banking and private equity. The guests delivered a workshop on raising awareness about IP protection and acquisition for the Armenia Startup Academy startups who are going to be the future “innovators.”

More than 30 entrepreneurs were present during the workshop including scientific organization representatives. Startups were introduced to the concepts of assets, monetization, patenting, trademark, copyright and licensing. The Orion team also elaborated in detail on the types of IP rights that can be licensed from Armenian sources and the applicable legal scheme for licensing the rights. Several tips for writing a successful application were introduced to startups. “Be so good they can't reject your application,” said Emma Arakelyan.

In conclusion, Emma Arakelyan called the startups to “be well-informed about copyrights and patents, accept the difficulties as challenges, work both on yourself and on your product, gather feedback and overcome the obstacles.”

About Orion Orion Worldwide Innovations is an intellectual property hub that offers a full-service package to protect innovations, while streamlining all laborious IP application preparation and registration processes. Orion intends to build an innovation inventory and plans to share the inventory template with NDA document to both startups and investors in order to establish formal working relationships. Subsequently, it will allow startups and investors to protect and then to explore the monetization potential of their IP.

About Armenia Startup Academy The Armenia Startup Academy is a Catalyst Foundation project implemented in the framework of EU4Business Support to SME Development (SMEDA) Project, which is co-funded by the European Union and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by GIZ’s Private Sector Development in South Caucasus Programme. SMEDA is part of the EU4Business and EU4Innovation initiatives of the European Union.