Are you concerned with protecting your IP and business when an employee leaves for a competitor?
Are you comfortable with and understand all the pitfalls of acquiring IP?
Are you excessively spending on contentious IP actions without a cost justifiable return?
What are you doing to minimize IP risk and looking around the corners for impediments?
Does it concern you that IP issues seem to arise well-down the commercialization path?
Is your business being blocked from pursuing technology or products because of the IP of others?
Are you surprised with IP litigation, challenges to your IP or threats with a license offering?
Do you wonder why without warning you receive an IP cease and desist or warning letter?
While you can never eliminate all the risk of infringing upon the IP rights of others, or prevent the loss of valuable trade secrets, you certainly can minimize it. IP litigation is time consuming, very expensive and a company-wide distraction.
The most challenging risk to manage
is the loss of confidential information and trade secrets.
Proving confidentiality or trade secrecy is challenging, and oftentimes brings unwanted attention to its loss in the first place. IP risk mitigation requires IP Excellence. You need to have an IP Strategy, IP Training, IP Management, and most importantly an overarching culture for IP awareness.
The IP Strategy provides you with a game plan for protecting your most strategic IP. If you do not know what your most valuable IP assets are, how would you know if they are being protected or lost.
IP Training provides you with the heightened awareness for identifying IP issues and for understanding its value. If your organization does not understand what is IP and the rights that come with it, identification of IP and its issues are often missed.
IP Management includes the necessary processes for strategically executing best practices for identifying, protecting, maintaining, and enforcing your IP. Failure to strategically protect and defend your IP, often will result in its loss, or diminishing its value.
It is crucial to have a culture for understanding the importance and value for IP. IP is the lifeblood of companies today, and much of it is in the hands and minds of your employees. Having a culture well trained and sensitized to its significance, raises their level of protection and care for it.
Questions to Ask
How do you manage and review competitive intelligence?
Do you include business and technical intelligence and IP?
Do you regularly monitor relevant IP that may impact your business?
Do you request clearance opinions from your IP counsel?
If you do, how do you manage tweaks on cleared technology and products?
When do you consider the IP of others during your innovation process?
Are you keeping stakeholders informed along the way?
Have you identified your trade secrets and know who has access to them?
If identified, do you know where they are and how they being protected?
Have you reviewed your business conduct policy and employment contracts?
Do you have a robust and easy process for obtaining confidentiality agreements?
IP Excellence can help you design and implement systems and processes for mitigating your specific risks. Not all companies have the same requirements or risk profile. We will also work with you to prevent leakage and loss of your confidential information and trade secrets.