An exhibition showing the intellectual property (IP) behind Steve Jobs’ innovations opened to the public at WIPO on March 30, 2012 and will run through to World Intellectual Property Day on April 26, 2012. The exhibition ties in with this year’s World Intellectual Property Day theme – Visionary Innovators.

The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World is located in the atrium of the new WIPO building and is open to the public from 9.00am through 6pm. It features over 300 of the patents that bear Steve Jobs name along with many of Apple’s trademarks. The exhibition is co-organized by WIPO and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and supported by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva.

The exhibit was created and designed by Invent Now, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering invention and creativity through its many programs and which runs the National Inventors Hall of Fame and Museum on the USPTO campus in Alexandria, Virginia.

Opening the exhibition, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry hailed Jobs as "one of the most influential technology thinkers and actors of his generation.”

Ambassador Betty E. King, U.S. Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, said the exhibit was an "opportunity to see how Steve Jobs, at the helm of Apple, acted upon his vision, and in doing so shaped the means by which our world functions and communicates on a daily basis.”

The exhibit, with its iconic panels in the form of iPhones, was first shown in the lobby of the U.S. PTO Office shortly after Job's death, recalled Teresa Stanek Rea, Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Leaving the PTO office late at night, Stanek Rea said she would often find the PTO lobby full of people gazing at the patents. Steve Job's brilliance was in the marriage of design to function, she said, citing the innovator's famous words: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”