Can You Keep a Secret?
The competitive landscape can be a dangerous place for an early-stage entrepreneur, and even the best business plan can fall prey to imitators unless the entrepreneur is able to protect her business with some type of exclusive rights. Patents can provide powerful protection, and provisional patents are often a good choice for creating early-stage exclusivity. However, no business should overlook the potential value of trade secret protection.
There are two key issues to consider when evaluating trade secret protection: what type of information can an entrepreneur protect and what does she have to do to protect it? In general, any information can be a trade secret if (1) it is non-public information that has value because it is not publicly known and (2) the holder of the information is taking adequate steps to hold it in confidence. Trade secrets can include things as diverse as business plans, business contacts, financial analysis, inventions, formulas, designs and methods.
Read the rest of this entry »
Provisional Patents: A (Temporary) First Step
Any entrepreneur is likely to be euphoric when her company discovers a novel and potentially valuable genomic invention that may be protectable by a patent. But when the celebrations start to fade, difficult decisions will remain about how to protect and exploit the intellectual property rights associated with the invention. A company may protect its rights by carefully avoiding disclosure until it has reduced its invention to practice (that is, made it work) and filed a patent application. But our entrepreneur may not have that option. Reducing the invention to practice requires money, which may be in short supply.
For the purpose of this post, we assume that the entrepreneur has already taken the required steps to be sure the company owns all necessary rights in the invention. (See our earlier Bench to Market articles: “What Happens When Professors Have Valuable Inventions?” and “Don’t Overlook Agreements with the Inventors.”) How can she now have the discussions with outside parties (such as venture capital firms) that may be necessary to commercialize the invention, without risking the loss of important intellectual property rights?
