Management of business secrets, whether formal trade secrets, confidential information or data requires a pragmatic approach, with a people-centric focus on strategic management across the organisation.
2. Establish an IP register to track IP in the organisation.
This should:
- Include all forms of IP associated with the organisation’s products, services and projects
- Contain both IP created internally and IP imported from external sources
- Track any encumbrances for external IP, e.g. associated licenses
- Categorise IP as core or non-core (and potentially as not-used)
- Link IP to products and services to allow IP disassembly for exit
- Support a culture within the organisation that recognises the value of the IP created
It is important to capture the IP generated in the business, but also important to understand what IP is imported into the business and how those IPs relate to the various products and services developed.
As a minimum requirement an IP register for a software and data-intensive organisation should capture:
- The form of the IP – patent, trade mark, copyright (source code), etc.
- What products or services the IP is linked to and whether its core or non-core
- For internal IP the creator, date of creation, a sensitivity level (public, private, confidential etc)
- For external IP the source (e.g. URL), associated license (license type for Open Source), version number
The information from the IP register can be used to build structured views of the IP.
The register may be filtered and sorted along various fields, but for the purposes of providing a structured view of how the IP supports products and services it may be more helpful to create a linking grid view.
This can be done using pivot tables in Excel or database queries. However, it is created the view should provide the linkages between products/services and the IP, and show which IPs are core, non-core or even unused.
Once the organisation has a structured view of its IP it is able to make better informed decisions on maintaining, sharing and exiting the IP.
An exit strategy either through sale or M&A is likely to require the organisation to identify and manage core vs platform specific IP in order to cleanly separate particular products or services for sale – this is known as the IP disassembly problem. The IP disassembly (IPD) problem is defined as the problem of finding a contractual arrangement for allocation of IP rights and licenses that allows for separating and disintegrating a company, business unit, project entity, resource set, or IP unit in order to enable a transaction, organizational transfer, or dissolution of it. Key to managing the associated risks is having an ex ante structured view of the parent company’s IP for each product and the core / common IP.