CENSIS white paper: Intellectual Property in Business

Intellectual Property in Business: IP basics, IP management, IP strategy
Introduction
This white paper is the result of a project funded
by CENSIS, which was devoted to providing
methodological guidance for young tech ventures on
approaches and steps in the development of intellectual
property (IP) strategy. The partners in the project were
Adam Smith Business School (University of Glasgow),
Krucial, a Glasgow-based technology company, and
Scintilla, patent and trade mark attorneys based
in Glasgow.
A startup will face numerous issues involving developing
a product, hiring qualified employees, raising capital,
and more. With all of these issues, intellectual property
can feel distracting, expensive, or contrary to the goals
of just getting a product to market before someone
else does. However, intellectual property is often the
most valuable asset of a technology startup. Protecting
intellectual property can be essential to obtaining
venture capital funding or preventing competitors from
unfairly competing with you. 1
The target audience for the paper is:
• start-ups and SMEs which are new to IP and aim to
begin their IP journey in the right way
• companies in the growth phase, which already have
some experience with IP (e.g., they have already
registered IP or have applications in the pipeline)
and wish to implement IP procedures into their daily
operations
• IP managers and tech transfer officers who intend to
integrate a strategic approach into the development
of the IP portfolio.
The paper sets out to make the topic of IP more
approachable, less intimidating and more manageable,
offering experience-based advice and methods that
are designed to help businesses structure their IPrelated
issues and make the best of their IP. It provides
a practical perspective on IP and explains the close
connection between IP and business operations. It
also offers a tool – Business IP Canvas – to help them
navigate through IP matters that relate to their business
model. This tool is based on the well-known Business
Model Canvas by Osterwalder 2 and is designed to
cover various business activities that involve generating,
sharing or acquiring IP.
Licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial CC BY-NC licence
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
1
Richard Harroch and Neel Chatterjee, ‘10 Intellectual Property Strategies for Technology Startups’, (2017)
Forbes, accessed 2 December 2022.
2
Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers,
(edited by Tim Clark, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2010).
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