Developing and maintaining a strategic approach to your business’s IP rights could be the difference between your company thriving or being overtaken by the competition.
Intellectual Property (IP) rights can provide a number of significant benefits to your company.
- IP rights can provide protection against a competitor using your products or brands
- Registered IP rights can be an asset. They can help convince financial institutions to invest in a business, enabling more money to be raised for development.
- IP rights can be used to generate revenue through licensing or selling your IP rights to others.
- Your IP rights could potentially also be used as a bargaining tool if you are accused of infringing another company’s IP rights.
- Registered IP can enhance the “cutting-edge” reputation of your business.
- You may be able to benefit from a reduced rate of corporation tax on profits generated by products that relate to your patents using the UK Patent Box scheme.
On the other hand, the IP rights of others can cause your company problems if they are not identified and assessed early enough, or if those IP rights are not handled in the right way.
It is therefore important to have a complete strategy for your business when it comes to IP. At Sandersons. we believe that a comprehensive IP strategy should consider four main areas:
We can help you develop an IP strategy specific to your business that covers all four of these areas.
In this four-part series of blogs we will explain how we can help you to achieve your IP GOAL.
Generating IP for your business.
1. Innovation Awareness
Do your employees know what IP is and do you encourage your employees to generate IP?
With a basic knowledge of IP and with suitable incentives, employees may be more likely to identify when they have created something that could be worth protecting. To help your employees to identify when they may have generated useful IP, Sandersons can run seminars that are tailored specifically to the aims of your company and that set-out the basics of IP. We can also discuss with you ways to encourage your employees to create IP and tell you about the IP that they have created.
This IP could then be used to protect your products or brand or to generate income through licences and assignments.
2. Innovation Capture
Do you know what IP has been generated by your employees?
Your employees may be thinking of new ideas all the time but those ideas may be overlooked if they are only mentioned to you in passing. Sandersons can help you keep track of the IP that is developed by your employees by providing you with forms tailored to your business that can be used to record IP. These forms may sound simple but collecting the right information is not always straightforward. These forms are also a useful tool which can be used by you or us when assessing how best to utilise any IP.
3. Innovation Assessment
Do you know what is worth protecting?
Some ideas are worth protecting whereas others are less useful or are not protectable, and it is not always easy to spot when useful IP has been created. IP rights can be complicated, but Sandersons can help you to identify whether a particular idea can be protected and is worth protecting. We can also provide advice on which types of protection are suitable for a particular idea. We can also carry out searches to help you to decide if your idea is sufficiently original.
The above are just some of the ways in which Sandersons can help you to achieve your GOAL of a comprehensive IP strategy.
If you would like any advice regarding Generating IP or any of the other topics in this series of blogs, then do not hesitate to contact Sandersons to book a free 30-minute consultation. Please remember to mention this blog when booking your consultation.
Next week we will be discussing Obtaining IP rights…
