IAM4RE is an EU Horizon Europe project working to strengthen how European research institutions manage, protect, and valorise their intellectual assets. Its focus reaches well beyond patents into the wider terrain of knowledge valorisation, standardisation, and the alignment of institutional practice with the EU Codes of Practice on Intellectual Asset Management and Standardisation.
The project builds a full learning ecosystem for the Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), Knowledge Transfer Offices (KTOs), research managers, and innovation support staff working inside Public Research Organisations and Higher Education Institutions. That ecosystem is now made up of four services: a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a Training Suite, the Train-the-Trainer Programme, and a set of Improved Services piloted with a selected group of institutions.
What the Train-the-Trainer Programme actually does
The Train-the-Trainer (TtT) Programme is aimed at people who are already tasked with delivering training inside their institutions: trainers, knowledge transfer professionals, research managers, innovation support staff, and other institutional multipliers. Rather than adding another layer of subject-matter content, it focuses on how existing IAM4RE materials can be adapted, sequenced, and delivered to different audiences in different institutional settings.
That distinction matters. The TtT is not a course about Intellectual Asset management (IAM) in the classical sense; it is a programme about teaching IAM. Participants work through practical guidance on facilitation, on designing coherent learning pathways for their own colleagues and researchers, on adapting materials to specific audiences, and on assessing whether the training has landed. Case studies, trainer resources, assessment tools, and implementation materials support the process from planning through to evaluation.
The reason for this focus is straightforward: a single well-supported trainer can reach hundreds of researchers over the course of a career. If IAM4RE is going to have a durable effect on how European institutions handle knowledge valorisation, the multiplier layer is where that effect gets built.
Where the TtT sits in the wider ecosystem
The programme is best understood as part of a sequence. Learners entering the IAM4RE ecosystem typically start with the MOOC, which offers a broad and accessible introduction to intellectual asset management and knowledge valorisation. From there they move into the Training Suite, a more structured capacity-building layer with deeper modules on specific topics. The Train-the-Trainer Programme sits at the top of that pathway, for those ready to take what they have learned and pass it on inside their own organisations.
The TtT Programme was officially launched on 1 July 2026 during the IP Ambassador Summer Summit in Split, Croatia, where the IAM4RE consortium presented the full e-learning ecosystem to an audience of trainers and IP professionals from across Europe. It aligns explicitly with the EU Codes of Practice on IA Management and Standardisation, and with the wider objectives of the European Research Area. In practice, that alignment gives institutions using the TtT a route to embed the Codes of Practice into their day-to-day training activity rather than treating them as an abstract policy layer.
Trust-IT and COMMpla behind the programme
Within the IAM4RE consortium, Trust-IT Services and COMMpla have led the work that turns the TtT from a concept into a functioning programme.
COMMpla has been responsible for the technical development of the platform on which the programme runs, as well as for the instructional design underpinning it: the pedagogical architecture, the sequencing of learning activity, and the interaction patterns that make the material usable for real trainers in real institutional settings.
Trust-IT has contributed on two connected fronts. On the technical side, we have worked alongside COMMpla on the platform itself, ensuring it integrates cleanly with the wider IAM4RE ecosystem and with the project's overall communication infrastructure. On the outreach side, Trust-IT leads the communication, dissemination, and engagement work package for IAM4RE, which means driving awareness of the TtT among target audiences across Europe, and building the pipeline of trainers who will take up the programme in the months ahead. The subject-matter content itself, the material that participants engage with, was developed by the specialist partners in the consortium whose expertise sits in IAM, standardisation and knowledge valorisation.
For Trust-IT, contributing to the Train-the-Trainer Programme is a natural extension of the work we have done for years alongside European research communities, and it is the kind of work we care about doing well. The TtT is not a one-off dissemination product, it is an attempt to build something durable inside the institutions that shape European research and innovation. Helping to design the platform that carries the programme, and then helping to put it in front of the right audiences, means we are contributing at both ends of the same effort: making sure the tool works, and making sure the people who need it find it.
