InnovationQ Solutions
Trade Secret Management
A Trade Secret is a technology that's maintained by a company in secrecy. More important, it is only enforcable if reasonable safeguards are in place to maintain it's secrecy.
All intellectual property starts as a trade secret. Everything your company produces that is not a hard good is a potential trade secret. Savvy, innovative companies have learned to leverage trade secrets as an economic and strategic component of their IP portfolio. InnovationQ helps to manage trade secrets in a secure and easy manner.
A Trade Secret allows a company to:
- Prevent competitors from using the technology
- Recover damages due to misappropriation
- Prevent former employees from taking the invention to a competitor
- Prevent unlawful disclosure of the trade secret
Failure to protect your Trade Secrets means:
- Any competitor can freely use your technology
- Departing employees can share your ideas with other companies
- Loss of competitive advantage
- Loss of market dominance
InnovationQ provides key tools for effective Trade Secret Management
- Keeping the wrong people from accessing
- Secure login and access control
- Clearly defined user roles and permissions
- Alerts of suspicious activity
- Large number of document downloads, previews, etc
- Untypical off-hour access
- Reports summarizing all user and document activity
- Providing irrefutable proof at trial
- All documents are legally safeguarded
- Proof that documents have not been altered
- Proof of secure access to the system by authorized users
Invention Review Process
Many key innovations are not used strategically. Decisions about the ideas that drive company growth are left to ad hoc processes or languish in the hands of individuals who do not grasp the full potential of them. A solid invention review process helps companies make clear decisions about critical innovations in order to protect them and use them to the benefit of the entire organization.
With a strong Invention Review Process in place, an invention can thrive as an IP asset such as:
- Patent and Patent Application
- Trademark and Copyright
- Enforceable Trade Secret
- Defensive Publication
- Licensable asset
- Peer Reviewed Article
With a strong Invention Review Process, a good invention achieves the fame, recognition, and reward it deserves. Rather than becoming devalued, it becomes a prized and valuable corporate asset!
R&D Collaboration
With an R&D Collaboration system, managers and in-house counsel can get ahead of innovation and be proactive about innovation decisions.
Managing innovation across large research and development teams can be difficult. Great ideas are lost and critical ones stay buried because individuals control all the important information.
An R&D Collaboration system provides significant advantages to the century-old paper-based notebooks and files on a hard drive. Documents can instantly be shared across departments and locations, they are date-stamped, archived, and categorized for easy retrieval, additionally it allows for automated invention scanning/scrubbing by technology managers.
To effectively foster collaboration in an R&D environment, there must be the ability to:
- Store important research documents where they can be accessible to others
- Secure the documents so that sensitive information does not leak
- Search for documents for interesting ideas generated by others
- Share findings and papers with others, both inside and outside the organization
- Report on critical metrics to help manage and foster innovative ideas
With InnovationQ, critical ideas can be secured, shared, searched for, and a process in put in place for reviewing them.
Publication Clearance System
Innovative companies produce papers, manuals, presentations and many other types of publications. The question you have to ask is “Do those publications contain critical intellectual property and what should happen if they do”. A publication clearance system ensures that all documents have been reviewed and approved by the proper technical and legal personnel prior to outside publication. Workflow processes automatically notify decision-makers to review a document at particular point in the process. This insures that the right people make decisions about the document in a timely fashion.
There are significant risks if a publication clearance system is not in place. Some of these are:
- Loss of valuable IP rights such as Patent and Trade Secret rights
- Potentially millions of dollars in lost licensing revenue
- Diminished competitive advantage
- Difficult product positioning
- Decreased shareholder value
Not only can InnovationQ help solve these problems, but IP.com can publish your public domain documents as well. With InnovationQ and IP.com’s Technical Publications Library, you have a complete and secure technical publication system that insures that your intellectual property is used safely and wisely.
Freedom To Operate
The patent landscape is now global. Patents can be filed anywhere in the world. New products may be encumbered by these patents, delaying or even halting worldwide product launches.
Freedom to Operate (FTO) searches are vital to technology-based product launches. Typically, a lightweight FTO search is conducted early in the development process to identify patents that may encumber key features. Another is often performed late in the development process to formally check and see if there are any patents that might delay the release of feature or product and develop a strategy for dealing with any ensuing problems.
An inefficient FTO process can delay or halt a worldwide product rollout. An incomplete FTO process can be disastrous, leading to law suits and the withdrawal of a key product from the marketplace. Tracking information flows during the FTO process is also important to the security of your intellectual property.
