Is your IP a strategic asset? It can be. Let’s discuss! I transform your intellectual property into drivers of your business growth.
Ever wonder how Coca-Cola has maintained market dominance for over a century? Not with patents – they expired ages ago – but with perhaps the most famous trade secret in business history. While patents last 20 years, trade secrets can protect your competitive advantage indefinitely. That's why when clients rush to patent everything, I often ask: "Are you sure that's the best strategy?" Some of the most valuable IP I've helped protect never saw the inside of a patent office: ↪ Manufacturing processes that cut costs by 40% ↪ Customer prediction algorithms that drive millions in sales ↪ Supply chain optimizations that competitors can't crack ↪ Sales playbooks that consistently outperform the market Patents require public disclosure. Trade secrets? They work like a vault – valuable precisely because nobody else can peek inside. But of course, there is the catch: not everything can qualify as a trade secret and once a trade secret leaks, it's gone forever. And still - I recently helped a tech company pivot from patents to trade secrets for their AI algorithms. Why? Because their competitive advantage wasn't in the basic concept (which would be publicly disclosed in a patent), but in the thousands of small optimizations they'd developed (They still kept some patents, but that's not their main "joker" now). Success with trade secrets isn't about luck. It's about strategy. Not sure where to start? Answer the questions below: ↪ What truly drives your competitive advantage? ↪ What can't be easily reverse-engineered? ↪ What's worth protecting? ↪ Do you have solid systems: need-to-know access controls, digital and physical security, clear documentation protocols? ↪ Have your employees had a training that sticks? ↪ Do you have contracts that actually work? And a Million-Dollar Question: 🔐 What intellectual property drives your real competitive advantage? If it leaked tomorrow, could you recover? If you took time to answer the above questions, you know what to do next. And if you would like to talk about building a protection strategy that actually works in the real world, reach out to my team to schedule an intro call. 📨 [email protected]
Very true ...... AND another point strengthening your conclusion --> over the past 10-20 years, US patents have become more difficult (and much more expensive) to enforce, with reduced certainty of the outcome. CAVEAT --> All this applies ONLY if the technology is NOT reverse engineerable (this certainly applies to some algorithms). Q --> what about those in between cases where it MIGHT be reverse engineerable? [this is much more common than many people think] A --> Consider filing a US-only patent application with a no-publication request. This precludes non-US filing, precludes PCT filing, and exempts the application from 18 month pre-grant publication. With the correct drafting and filing tactics, this US-only tactic will allow an applicant to POSTPONE the 'patent vs. trade secrets' decision by 2-5 years, and give them the option to later RETROACTIVELY pivot back to patents with the crucially-important earlier filing date. For example, after 2-5 years in the marketplace, it might turn out that competitors have reverse engineered the technology or even invented it independently. Or the business fundamentals might have shifted (e.g. SME acquired by a large corporation, much better technology invented in the interim, etc).
PATENT BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
1d🔑Maria Boicova-Wynants this is super true. Thank you for sharing. Have you written a book 📚 about IP?🤔