Magazine BEAST #12 2018

8
#Business | Legal
DEVELOPING
AN INDUSTRIAL
PROPERTY
BY NATHALIE
STRATEGY CRUCHET
© Shutterstock - solarseven
Having an industrial property
strategy can be extremely
important and have longterm
effects for companies.
Properly implemented, such
a strategy can yield the
most valuable assets of a
company, at a relatively
modest cost. On the other
hand, ignoring it, and for
instance forgetting to protect
a significant innovation, can
prove extremely costly.
What is industrial property?
The increasing tendency of companies to protect their
innovation calls for a correspondingly increased sophistication
in how to handle its own industrial property rights. For example,
although filing is mostly recommended for a new invention,
buying or licensing a competing or partially competing patent
could be an alternative or even a complementary option.
Industrial property represents the part of the intellectual
property of any company, which is protectable by registrable
titles such as patents, trademarks, designs and models.
Intellectual property comprises non-registrable and unregistered
rights, such as copyright.
A patent is the title which confers to the inventor and/
or the applicant, the right to prevent others from exploiting
the invention covered by it. The State grants the patentee a
monopoly of exploitation for a maximum period of 20 years,
in return for describing the invention in sufficient details for
a skilled person to be able to reproduce it and to add it to its
technical knowledge.
Different Industrial property rights protect different aspects of
an innovation. A patent, for example, protects the technical and
functional characteristics of a product or process, whereas a
trademark protects the name, sign or logo, used by a company to
identify itself and/or its products or services and to distinguish
them from those of its competitors. An industrial design,
on the other hand, is the most appropriate for protecting the
appearance of the whole or part of a product, inclusive of twodimensional
and three-dimensional aspects.
Identify the intellectual assets of your company
For a company to become aware of its intangible assets is a
crucial step. Indeed, it is important to define the intellectual
capital of the company which results from the combination of
human creativity, inventiveness and imagination that it employs.
Once these intellectual assets have been identified, and on
the understanding that each company has different objectives,
an industrial strategy should be established.
BEAST MAGAZINE #12