Posted By Gbaf News
Posted on June 7, 2012
Companies, businesses are now concentrating on attaining the Intellectual Property (IP) rights. The reason the IP rights are important because:
- They help set the businesses at a better platform than the competitors.
- They can be sold or licensed, giving better revenue options.
- It offers something new and different to the customers
- Offers better marketing or branding techniques
- They can also be used as security or loans.
IP rights offer protection to more than one avenue to one’s business which comprises of the name and logo, designs, inventions, works of creative effort or trademarks which determines individuality of the company. IP protection helps foster innovation. Any business would flourish when it outperforms in areas like techniques, research and development with different ideas from their competitors. And these ideas need protection which is taken care of by IP protection.
The term ‘IP’ refers to the blend of unique ideas and innovations which exists in the human intellect and comes into existence from human brilliance, creativity and inventiveness. It is a legal right based on relevant national law which comprises of a particular type of intellectual property right. The IP rights are extensively practiced in a number of countries across the world and have enabled the contributed to the property-like rights including knowledge and creative expressions of mankind which gives an expression to the commercial value of the productivity delivered by human creativity. The property rights exercised by various companies allow them to use a particular idea under the legal framework and if a competitors plans to use the same idea, they need to take a prior consent of the IP right holder.
Surveys on economic studies have revealed that patents are the most preferred IP rights in relation to technological innovations. This can be explained in terms of number of patents owned by an enterprise which are basically used as the main indicators determining innovation intensity of a particular enterprise. Ideas and creative perceptions from many players are required to achieve success for a business to flourish and the effective use of IP plays an important role in minimizing the number of competitors involved and thus limiting the risk of the ideas getting shared.
Evidences collected states that Small and Medium sized enterprises (SMEs) tend to use trade secrets rather than implementing their IP rights. The reason why SMEs are ignoring the patented inventions is due to high cost and complexity associated with it. However, if these SMEs have to adopt the patented innovations they may get imperative response in terms of high returns or revenue generation.
