Intellectual property rights are becoming ever more important and are among the central topics that founders need to get to grips with from the off.
- How innovative and scalable is the business idea and business model?>
- Is there a prototype?
- How many customers have you already sold to?
- How qualified is he team to put the business plan into practice?
- Can the business model or services be protected, and if so, how?>
- Is the product or service newand exclusive orare you in territory that has already been occupied?
What Property Rights Are There?
The role of intellectual property law is to offer efficient protection. Goods and services have different characteristics and ca be protected by different property rights.
- A patent can be granted for inventions that relate to a company’s own products or manufacturing processes.
- The form that characterises a product can be protected as a design.
- The name of a product or service that is used and advertised on the market can be entered into the trademark register.
- Copyright exists to protect software, texts, music and images.
Strategies For Property Rights: What To Protect?
Interesting, innovative and successful products draw the attention of customers and competitors – but also of copycats. Following a long period of research and development or major investment, the question of protection needs to be not just discussed but resolved by the time a product leaves the factory, at the very latest. It is therefore important to define a protection strategy for products or services of this nature. Businesspeople have some key questions to reflect on here:
- Defensive or offensive strategy?
- Keeping know-how secret or patenting it and publishing the invention?>
- Is protection needed at all?
- Is there a risk of copycatting?
- Defining areas to be protected: For which goods and services should a trademark be registered?
- Should only certain part or the whole be patented?
- In which countries should the protection exist?
Where Will We Protect Our Services?
The principle of territoriality applies to the validity of property rights in a country or group of countries. Outside these countries, intellectual property is freely available. This begs the question as to the extent of the protection required for products, applications and services around the world, as every country has its own tradition in terms of laws and proceedings.
Official languages represent an additional hurdle. Countries generally do not accept applications written in a foreign language. This means that costly translations are needed.It also makes sense to clarify whether there is any logic in sellingthe product in a countrywhere the sales structure is either non-existent or is only just being created.
This means that founders in Switzerland tend to focus on Germany, Austria and Switzerland to start with. The Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (www.ige.ch) is the port of call for intellectualproperty in Switzerland. Along with www.swissreg.ch, it provides a database that enables even first-timers to undertake initial, simple searches in intellectual property registers.