In business, everyone has competition. The issue is: How do you stand out from the competition?
You need weapons to attack your competitors and to stand out above the competitors.
You need fences to prevent your competitors from encroaching on your market share, your territory.
IP tools/IP rights are weapons that you would be looking at. These are the ammo, the weapon, and the fence that you would need in your business artillery.
Geetha from KASS International shared about how to monetize your business intellectual properties.
Of the different types of IP rights, we will focus on “Patents” first. Patent rights are given to an inventor for 20 years. These are exclusive rights to an invention in exchange for a public disclosure of the invention. An invention basically includes:
- Products
- Improvement to existing products
- Process and method of manufacture
- Improvement or modification to a process or method
- New non-obvious use of a known product (mainly pharmaceutical or chemical industry).
To put it in layman’s term, it is the moment when there is a technological solution to a problem. Let’s say a mobile phone for instance. The mobile phone was created because of the difficulty of having to be constantly at home or to be at a payphone at a specific time.
Remember those days when mobile phones were not around? You are constantly planning ahead and telling your parents to pick you up from school at a certain time, or meet a friend at a coffee shop at a certain time. Now, it’s real time. So, there was a problem in the market, and that was the technology created to adjust to the problem. Mobile phones can be carried everywhere and you can reach anyone at any time.
There are various types of issues faced in any specific industry like, for example, the pharma industry, the rubber industry, etc. There are also improvements in products or processes, or new products or processes. When these new inventions or new improvements are created, the inventor can obtain exclusive rights for them for 20 years. In return, documentation has to be filed in the IP office of the country where they are obtaining rights.
All information provided to the government is basically a public disclosure of how the invention works. The reason for this is giving all the information and making it available to the public will enable any competitor or anyone to actually work on the invention based on the information given and to improve on it. That encourages a nation of innovation.
It is constant innovation due to public disclosure of previous patents. If the information or the patents are given to the government but not revealed, it is very difficult to improve on something unknown unless the product can be reversed-engineered in a very easy manner. That is why there needs to be a public disclosure of an invention.
In return, the inventor gets 20 years exclusive right to use the invention or to export the invention. What does this exclusive right mean? This means that you have sole rights to manufacture the product, make the product or create the process. No other party can do this. You can use the product or process, you can offer the product or the process for sale, and you can import the product because you have rights in the country that it’s protected in, or you can export the product.
Exporting the product means you can manufacture in the country you’re protected in, but whether you can export it to another country, again, depends on whether you have rights there or if someone else has rights in the other country because patents are territorial. IP rights are on a country-by-country basis. So, if you have a product or technology and you want to have it protected, you have to look at the market that you would like to export to. That’s what it means by patents being territorial.
For Founder Method members, you can watch the full replay of the session here:
