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Protect your invention

If you want to exploit your idea and invention in an effective way, you should protect it using legal tools. The purpose of patents is to make information about inventions public. In return, a patent gives the inventor the exclusive right to exploit the invention for a period of time.

If you anticipate that your product will only be on the market for a short time, you might want to protect it by keeping it secret. Toys and fashion phenomena are such inventions. Keeping the Coca-Cola formula secret is based on the idea that it is not easy to copy the product.

However, the worst scenario is that secrecy will harm the commercial exploitation of the product. Moreover, it is possible that someone else comes up with the same idea, and a product based on your idea will be patented. You should therefore be aware that secrecy only works in certain cases.

Advantages and profitability

Patents often deal with new technical solutions that may require a lot of development work. For example, pharmaceutical research is very expensive, and the life span of medicines on the market is often long, which is why it is profitable to invest in a patent. When pondering whether you should apply for a patent, you should weigh up the potential yields against the patenting costs.

A patent may give you advantages in many different areas:

  1. Marketing
    Patents are important to your marketing because they put “an innovative label" on your product, which may increase its value.
  2. Value of your business
    Patents are used as one factor when assessing how much a business is worth.
  3. Attractiveness to investors
    Capital investors do not normally invest in businesses that do not have an appropriate patent strategy.
  4. Source of income
    Licence fees can be an important source of income to your business.
  5. Strategic benefit
    Patents are an integral part of a business’s IPR strategy, together with other forms of protection such as the design right and trademark.

Choose the right protection form

The following can also be protected: the appearance of a product or a part of it (design right), or a trade symbol for your business’s products (trademark). The statutory right to a literary or artistic work is in force without any separate application (copyright).

Our patent experts are ready to advise you about how to protect your invention. For example:

  • Does a design right protect my innovation better than a patent?
  • What does a patent really protect if it is difficult to figure out the manufacturing method from the end product?
  • How much does patenting my invention cost?
  • When is a utility model better than a patent?
Printable version Latest update 10.06.2019