Dr John Baxter

Senior Commercial Counsel

John Baxter commenced working for the Australian inventor Arthur Bishop in 1977, while completing his PhD studies in Mechanical Engineering in the field of vehicle dynamics at UNSW. Arthur Bishop’s invention and IP commercialisation business was subsequently corporatised as the Bishop Technology Group Limited in 1985.

John’s 33 year career at Bishop involved all aspects of product and process R&D, IP management, marketing of automotive steering technology and international IP licensing. As part of his responsibilities at Bishop, John managed various product R&D teams working in automotive hydraulic power steering, IC engine, advanced sensors and electric power steering, vehicle motorsport steering, and vehicle dynamics development.

In parallel with this R&D role, John also had responsibility for Bishop’s international patent portfolio of over 350 patents and patent applications, including the writing, filing, prosecution, maintenance and IP litigation. John was the inventor or co-inventor for many of Bishop’s international patent families, and has authored and co-authored numerous published technical papers in the field of automotive steering and the related field of vehicle dynamics.

John was a member of the Australian Government’s Advisory Council on Industrial Property (ACIP) for IP Australia for the period 1994 – 2000.

John left Bishop at the end of 2009 and is now a Commercial Counsel at Baxter IP, specialising in IP commercialisation and, in particular, the structuring of patents and licence agreements to maximise the commercial value of the IP.

John is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) and of the Society of Automotive Engineers Australasia (SAE-A), and is an Honorary Fellow of Engineers Australia.

Since 2004, John has been a member of the Dean’s Advisory Committee for the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW. Also from 2004 through to 2016 he was a director of Micreo Limited, an Australian defence microwave and photonics engineering company.

John’s recent engineering interests have involved the evolution of electric vehicles, and the architectural requirements of the electricity grid to enable charging of these vehicles, and the electrical integration with rooftop PV and stationary batteries. He is a member of the ATSE Energy Forum and assisted with ATSE’s submission to the Energy White Paper in 2014 and the organisation of ATSE’s “Intelligent Grids” Symposium in Sydney in May 2015, its “Beyond Coal – What Will Power NSW?” Symposium in Sydney in November 2016, and its “The NEM Post-Finkel” Symposium held in Sydney in November 2017.