Know How To Protect Your Know-How

A company's intrinsic expertise, ingenuity and savoir-faire are what makes it unique, marketable, and ultimately successful. When combined, these somewhat tenuous qualities, form part of the company's intellectual property. How then does a company protect them in order to gain and maintain a competitive advantage?

Almost anything that a company uniquely does or creates is considered proprietary information. The way a company manages and protects its proprietary information may entitle such information to further protection as either 'confidential information', 'know how' or 'trade secrets'. These terms can be defined as follows:

• Confidential information encompasses private internal proprietary information which is relevant to a business's operations that cannot be learned from other sources.