IIT Chicago-Kent Professor Edward Lee Chosen for Spark Camp at Harvard

IIT Chicago-Kent Professor Edward Lee, director of the Program in Intellectual Property Law, has been selected to attend Spark Camp at Harvard University this weekend. The four-day event, "Visionaries, Leaders and Managers," will bring together more than 75 "campers" to explore ideas on corporate culture and how organizations should operate.

"Spark Camp is a weekend of intimate conversations, idea development and problem-solving, with a focus on a specific theme involving the future of a better society," according to organizers. "Our focus is on convening exactly the right people around a particular topic that causes action in the field and offers up forward-thinking, tangible outputs that affect real change in our society..."

This is the sixth Spark Camp convened since 2011. Earlier events have focused on real-time information, data, money, design and storytelling. The program is co-sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the Knight Foundation, Webb Media Group and Open Society Foundations.

Professor Lee, a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, is pleased to be returning to Cambridge to attend Spark Camp. "There is an impressive diversity of talent among this year's campers," he said.

They include Edventure chair Esther Dyson; digital publisher Jennifer 8 Lee; Paola Antonelli, a senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA; ESPN executive Rob King; and Mary Beth Goodman, an IIT Chicago-Kent alumna and senior advisor on anti-corruption and governance with the U.S. State Department.

Spark campers are nominated to participate, and Professor Lee speculates he was selected as a result of his work related to Internet freedom. Professor Lee, the author of The Fight for the Future: How People Defeated Hollywood and Saved the Internet-For Now, is creating a nonprofit organization dedicated to Internet freedom.

"I hope to get a 'spark' of creativity and ideas for my research and nonprofit organization," said Professor Lee.

Founded in 1888, IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law is the law school of Illinois Institute of Technology, a private, Ph.D.-granting institution with programs in engineering, architecture, law, business, human sciences, applied technology, science and design.