“Every business has Intellectual Property (IP), whether it’s in the form of valuable copyrights, lists of customers, distinctive trade names, trade secrets, protectable designs or more unusually ground-breaking inventions and processes. But most businesses simply do not realize that they do own any IP and so cannot do anything with it. And this is so true of the creative industries whose currency is usually copyright or designs law but about which so little is known or understood.
And even those businesses that know that they have some IP usually do not appreciate just how much of it they do have and accordingly undervalue their business as a result. And if a business undervalues its IP why would it be surprised when someone else also underestimates its value? Indeed, according to the IPO 94% of UK businesses have never had their IP valued so not only do businesses not know what IP they have but 94% of the time they have no idea what its worth to them.
And as a result they are missing out on so much. Once you have identified, protected and valued your IP it can (for example) be used as collateral for taking out loans, or provide a benchmark for royalty licensing or simply recorded on the company balance sheet to increase the book value of a business.
So how does a business do this? How does it learn what IP it does have and what it needs to do to protect it properly and thus fully realize its value and potential?
There are three steps:
Step 1 – carry out an IP Audit or Strategy Review to identify the IP you do have and to create an appropriate strategy around your IP.
Step 2 – enhance the protection of that IP by ensuring whatever rights can be registered are registered to increase its value. Tony will deal with that.
Step 3 – get the enhanced IP valued. Becky and Kiki will talk about that.
Certain ACID corporate members are entitled to a free IP Strategy Review on joining. Typically, half a day with the owners of a business and/or their designer at their offices and get them to answer some questions from which we then produce a report squarely aimed at design led issues. With designers we obviously focus primarily on how their designs are protected from the original drawings through to enforcing or protecting the IP in those designs against copyists or competitors. But it’s not just advice about the law that we provide; we also provide practical and strategic advice such as “keep your drawings in a fire proof safe. If your building goes up in flames so might your IP”!
At Kounoupias IP we cover the full range of IP strategic advice across all sectors and we have a wider remit than just creative industries and designs. Both ACID and Kounoupias IP offer two kinds of IP strategic review. At the low end of the scale we offer a basic IP health check audit but we also offer a tailored full IP Strategic Review designed to draw out all conceivable IP issues from a business.
The health-check audit is a standard one page checklist (a bit like the tick box list some car retailers provide when your car is serviced). It is sent to the client to complete and then we schedule a one hour telephone call with them to talk through the results and recommend next steps. These next steps usually include registering and valuing IP rights.
The full IP strategic review is much wider and requires a visit to the client’s premises and usually a trawl through all their IP and non IP documents and agreements. We put together a very detailed questionnaire specifically for the client from which we then extract the important IP issues. We then produce a detailed report with our recommendations, which again will include what should be registered, where and how. But in the report we also cover core business issues such as the need for an IP strategy, IP risk reviews, IP training, IP registrations, IP valuations and IP tax issues within this. And where necessary we recommend trusted IP partners to carry these out.
Any business could be the subject of an IP audit or strategy review.
By way of example I have recently carried out three IP strategy reviews. The first was for a company pioneering a new procedure for non invasive prenatal diagnostics of a fetus to establish the presence of Down’s syndrome and other genetic abnormalities. The main focus of this audit were patent rights in a complicated scientific area.
The second was a strategy review of an ACID member company producing beautiful hand crafted oak garden furniture. In this review unsurprisingly we focused on design and copyright issues and the benefits or not of registering the designs. The third and most recent strategic review was of a cosmetics company producing nail varnish, and focused primarily on trade secrets, trade mark and branding issues.
IP is a business issue not a legal issue and as the name suggests an IP strategic review is designed to ensure that the IP strategy of a business is consistent with the overall strategy of that business. In my view the goals of any IP Strategy should at the very least include the following:
In the report, we produce a series of recommendations. If the client agrees with these recommendations, we then put the client in touch with trusted IP partners that can take the IP protection and strategy to the next step with registrations of rights IP rights identified and the subsequent valuation of those rights.
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