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For both Ariana and Asma it was critical that their respective business plans get accepted. While Araina was trying to win the investors for her start up, Asma wanted her much awaited promotion from the board of directors. While Ariana did crack the deal,sadly Asma didn’t.
Why?
Well to the investors,the fact, that Ariana’s product and the business plan itself were compliant to intellectual property /IP issues, found major acceptability. The investors felt safe in investing and believing in a business plan which ensures that the company or business wouldn’t’ run into the risk of an unauthorised use of a third party’s trade secret, trademarks, patents, copyrighted materials or any other IP rights. All that Ariana had done was to integrate an IP strategy along with her business plan and executed that in a well-planned manner. Asma also had avery coherent business plan evaluating the present position and suggesting useful strategies for achieving the future growth and objectives of the company. But she certainly fell short in having an IP Audit done for the company to identify the hidden assets which had developed in the past two decades and were vulnerable to unauthorised use and exploitations by employees and competitors.
For a business incubator or investor to be attracted to a business plan, it is necessary that your offering is unique, innovative and superior from that of the competitors.While every entrepreneur would boast of being unique and innovative, it is only a patent search result, a well-informed choice of the trade name, trademarks with steps taken to register them being well integrated into the business plan is what eventually convinces them amongst other things.
Furthermore, for most ongoing businesses, a lot of confidential business information gets built up over a period of time. This includes networking channels, the production details, inventions done secretly and the know-how from marketing, technical and financial departments. These might be the strongest source of their competitive advantage and one of their key reasons to success. Interestingly,all these are valuable IP assets for the company. A thorough IP audit on regular intervals ensures that such information are well guarded and there isn’t any ‘free riding’ on the success of the business by the competitors and employees. That’s how the business plan for future growth of an ongoing entity gets edgy and would be successful in today’s competitive environment.
Authored by Raka Roy – Senior Associate – Intellectual Property