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The importance of IP for your business
Developing strategies
Developing strategies
Evaluate your position
Keep in mind that the purpose of developing IP strategies is to help you meet your business objectives. It is essential you integrate your IP strategy with your company's business and marketing plans.
Determining the best strategies to protect your IP will depend on your particular business. An effective protection strategy may involve a range of IP protection options.
Using a range of protective measures gives you layers of protection and strengthens your position in the market.
For instance, you may take out a patent on your product, register its design and develop a branding strategy based on a registered trade mark which will position your product so it retains market strength when your patent expires, or if you decide the patent is no longer worth maintaining.
You may decide that a patent is not worthwhile and that maintaining secrecy and using confidentiality agreements will provide enough time in which to develop brand recognition and loyalty or develop new products and services. Or you may focus on a trade mark to develop your position in the market.
Explore all the options available and seek professional advice.
There are a number of Internet
sites that
can also provide information on a wide range of IP issues.
Don't forget about any potential export markets you may wish to target. It is important that you address the issue of international protection before going public with your IP in Australia.
Action check list
- Identify all IP associated with your business and itemise them in your business plan.
- Check that you really do own all IP used in your business or that you have the right to use it.
- List registered IP and place a dollar value on identified assets.
- List unregistered IP and give it a dollar value.
- List other valuable assets such as client lists and corporate knowledge.
- Identify key staff involved in developing, maintaining and protecting your IP and get them to sign agreements relating to confidentiality and competition.
- Educate staff on the nature of IP, how to protect it and their responsibilities.
- Consider ways you can use the IP system in your overall business strategy. Decide which markets (including overseas ones) you wish to pursue before going public.
- Develop an infringement strategy. Consider insuring your IP against infringement and against your infringement of someone else's IP.
- Search the patent, trade mark and design databases, as well as other literature and the Internet to ensure your ideas are new and to avoid infringing the rights of others. You can also search for new business opportunities and keep a tab on what your competition is doing.
- Maintain secrecy and be first to market.
- Make effective trade marks the core of your brand and image building strategy.
Making it work in the real world!
While many of their contemporaries in the food and hospitality industry wouldn't
give IP a second thought, the Dome Group of Companies
sees it as the cornerstone of their business. By integrating recognised principles
of IP protection and management in a way that was responsive to their specific
needs, they have created a package that is an impressive model for any industry.
Equally, Eagle Boys Pizza is not only a business
success story but also an IP triumph! Other business leaders are just beginning
to realise what Eagle Boys Pizza has long recognised-that watertight business
systems combined with aggressive and visionary IP protection can make your business
almost invincible!
Both of these companies actively defend their IP and consider this a vital part of their IP and business strategies.
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