Business Core · Business Assets · Module
Intellectual property
What the organisation owns that is not physical — trademarks, patents, copyright, data — and the rights position around each.
The idea
How it works
The first question is ownership rather than protection. Work produced by contractors, code built on licensed components, and data collected under particular terms all carry ownership questions that surface at the worst possible moment — during a sale or a dispute.
Registration is a separate decision. Not everything worth owning is worth registering, and the cost-benefit differs sharply between a trademark and a patent.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Establish ownership first
For each significant asset, confirm who actually owns it. Contractor agreements are the usual weak point.
- 02
Check licence obligations
Anything built on third-party components inherits their terms, including ones that affect what you can sell.
- 03
Decide what to register
Trademarks are cheap and worth defending; patents are expensive and only worth it where the protection is real.
- 04
Protect what cannot be registered
Trade secrets and know-how are protected by process and contract, not by registration.
One level in
The components of intellectual property
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Contractor agreements are where IP ownership most often fails. Check them before a due diligence process does it for you.
The other modules in business assets
Asset register
A current list of what the organisation holds, where it is, and who is responsible for it. Administrative-sounding and the foundation for everything else here.
LearnUtilisation
How much each asset is actually used against what it could be. The measure that turns an inventory into a management tool.
LearnLifecycle
Acquisition, maintenance, replacement and disposal, planned rather than triggered by failure. The unplanned version is always more expensive.
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