When you say IP, what do you mean?

At ipVA we often run education sessions on IP and its relevance to business.  Just last week, Andrew was discussing this with a group of CEOs as part of the European Leadership Programme.

In these sessions, we ask the businesses to rate where IP sits in relevance to their business:

Is IP a 10 or a 0?

As the sessions progress it invariably ends up that several of the participants rank the importance of IP much higher than they had initially thought (especially those below a “5″). Why?  Patents steal the show.

A surprising number of people (even at the C-level) use “IP” as a shorthand for “patents and maybe a trade secret or two”. A large part of what we do in our sessions essentially explains that the “P” in “IP” doesn’t stand for patents. Zeroing in on patents loses the point of IP: taking your intangibles – your Intellectual Capital – and making them a much more tangible business asset by plugging them into the full range of protection available.  That way, you can make “make them sweat” for your business.