Sharpening Your Edge

The first step to making the most of your intangible assets is identifying which ones give you your competitive edge. Think about why customers come to you and why they keep coming back.

You will usually find that the reasons are intangible assets - which will fall into four main categories - each of which having a different strategy associated with them.

Your reputation may be the reason. If so, part of your strategy may be to have a style guide and register your brand elements as trade marks. Often however, underpinning a good reputation are the in-house systems.

In-house systems, people and data often give a business an edge, but are most vulnerable because they can be difficult to formally protect. Building up a suite of good agreements and internal practices around ownership, culture, confidentiality and copyright can help.

Your competitive edge may result from you having the best performing products or processes. Analysing which features of these are best protected with patents or trade secrets forms part a strategy. Having R&D guided by IP considerations is another part.

Lastly, your edge may be that your product looks good. It may have an ergonomic shape, great patterning or otherwise appeal to the eye. Strategies include identifying potential longevity of the design and in which countries copyright or design registrations may be appropriate.

The key to successful strategies is to implement them as early as possible - particularly when an edge can be lost going unprotected into the public domain.