Every business, from start-ups through to international business giants, creates, owns and exploits intellectual property rights.
Indeed, intellectual property rights are essential to enabling a business to achieve its ambition, and are hugely valuable commercial assets. When understood and protected effectively, they can provide competitive advantage by allowing you to prevent your competitors from standing on your ground and will enable you to maximize your product or service’s value or even generate further revenue through licensing models or the like.
However, this is a complex area and many businesses don’t always fully understand their intellectual property rights or have people dedicated within their business to proactively protecting and managing them. The unfortunate reality is that many businesses wait until it is almost too late before considering how best to protect those rights, for example at the stage when their rights are being challenged or infringed by a third party. If you don’t secure your intellectual property rights at the outset, this can cause significant difficulties and costs in the future.
