Protecting Your Company’s IP: What Every Startup & Small Business Needs to Know

Intellectual property is becoming increasingly important when it comes to business valuation as well as success. Your business could likely benefit from more than one form of intellectual property protection. As such, knowing the differences between patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets can prove invaluable when the time comes to develop strategies that protect any inventive concepts or creative expressions you might develop, along with any source identifiers you might use when you take your products or services to market. Additionally, if you have any confidential, proprietary information, you may consider developing trade secret protection protocols to better maintain the secrecy of that information. Underlying all of those potential protection strategies are the written agreements necessary to not only ensure that your company’s information remains confidential, but also that you or your company will legally own any intellectual property you may ultimately try to monetize. 

This presentation will provide you with foundational knowledge on each of the four main types of IP (patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets) along with some related issues such as IP ownership and common startup mistakes, so that you will be better prepared as you start and grow your business.