Commercialising Your IP

After registration and protection comes commercialisation. Taking the idea from genesis to the marketplace.

If you are commercialising your own ideas, that is great and best of luck. Don’t close your mind and look beyond your own business for a licensee to commercialise your IP in a jurisdiction which you cannot service.

Commercialising the IP could simply be licensing it rather than working it yourself or maybe both. It is always nice to collect royalties. It is to your benefit to collect royalties, generating an income from your IP without any of the associated work in commercialising it.

Watch for pitfalls:

• Others may own IP rights that impact
• Others contributing to the ideas may, without proper agreement in place, end up owning IP rights in their contribution;
• Not using confidentiality agreements/NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreements) at all or over relying on them.
• Not having a defined licence agreement setting out the clear terms of the relationship between you and your licensee

The IP system can be used to identify potential commercial threats and opportunities for example by patent or trade-mark searching. Indeed some of the best commercial partnerships have been formed when IP searching threw up the name of a company active in an area of interest.