Intellectual Property: The basics

What is Intellectual Property? 

Intellectual Property (IP) is all about the legal rights to own ideas and creative works. IP can protect your company’s inventions, designs, brand names, logos, and creative works. These rights help ensure that you can use, sell, or license your works, and prevent others from using them without your permission.    

What are the different types of IP? 

There are several types of intellectual property. Each type of IP helps protect different aspects of your business:  

• Patents: which protect technical inventions, such as how something works, what it does, how it’s made or what it’s made from 
• Design rights: which protect the appearance of a product 
• Trade marks: which protect brand names and symbols 
• Copyright: which protects creative works 
• Trade secrets: a special category of confidential information

The importance of IP for small businesses

For small businesses, IP protection isn’t just a legal necessity, but can be used as a strategic tool. For example, it can help you stay competitive with others in the market. Trademarks and brand names will distinguish your business, making it easier for customers to recognize and prefer your products or services. IP can also be a valuable asset, increasing the overall worth of your business. Having a strong IP portfolio can attract investors and potential buyers, as they see long-term value in your protected innovations and brand.   

Usually, the most obvious reason to register IP is the legal protection it can offer you in cases of IP infringement. For example, Specsavers VS Asda in 2010 saw Specsavers suing the store for using a logo similar to its own and for a slogan that allegedly infringed on Specsavers’ trademark. Specsavers won the case, emphasizing the importance of protecting your brands’ logos and slogans to make sure you can maintain your brand identity. Another example is Dyson VS Hoover where Hoover was ordered to stop selling specified products and pay damages for infringing on Dyson’s patent for bagless vacuum cleaner technology.

To ensure that you aren’t infringing on existing intellectual property, you should always do some due diligence before launching anything new onto the market. There are different ways you can do this such as:

• Check patent and trademark databases or copyright and design registries
• Hire an IP attorney to conduct a freedom to operate (FTO) analysis 
• Do a thorough search of your own using relevant and similar keywords, names, slogans etc

Taking the extra time to do this can protect your small business from legal disputes, potential financial losses, and reputational damage.   

Tools and Resources  

If you are a small women-led business and have struggled with navigating IP, you are not alone. Registering IP can be challenging due to financial constraints which make it difficult to afford legal fees and filing costs. Additionally, the complex and time-consuming nature of the registration process can be daunting, especially if you are already juggling other responsibilities which many women are, such as caring responsibilities and running a household. Access to affordable legal expertise can also be limited, however consulting legal experts or IP attorneys in most cases is necessary and will ensure the process of registering is completed correctly. 

However, there is support and resources out there to help you with developing an IP strategy for your business:  

• Business Gateway: Intellectual property: the basics | Business Gateway | Business Gateway (bgateway.com) 
• Scottish Enterprise IP support: Intellectual property support for business | Scottish Enterprise (scottish-enterprise.com) 
• Business and IP centre Glasgow: Protecting Your Ideas – Glasgow Libraries Online Library (csglasgow.org)
• Intellectual Property Office: Intellectual Property Office – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) 

Realising the potential of your IP  

You may not think your business holds much IP. But that is where you could be wrong. Many women business owners underestimate the value of their IP. While running your business, you are constantly generating knowledge, therefore continually adding value to it by means of the Intellectual Assets and IP Rights that you create. So, that’s why it’s important you know how to identify and protect the IP that you are continually generating. 

To read more on realising the potential of your IP, discover this article by IP attorney Dr Claudia Duffy as she breaks down the significant disparities that exist in the use of the intellectual property system by women and other minority groups, and her mission to change perceptions of IP for women business owners.  

For more top tips and resources on how to protect your IP, check out our Intellectual Property Toolkit.