Protect your Business Model before others do it

Did you know that small and medium sized enterprises (SME) make significantly less use of intellectual property rights (IPR) such as patents and trademarks, when compared to larger companies, in spite of IPR being good predictors of company growth? IPR can be critical, because often it’s not the first mover but followers which later capture the market for a product or service.

In the discussion, we'll be looking at the key ways of how to describe a business model and connect them to IPR: Michael Porter's established approaches such as 5 Forces or the value chain, and also more recent developments such as the Osterwalder canvas. They can be useful in finding out what your company needs. And what not. Because IPR don't come for free.

This talk will be most useful for manufacturing Startups, but we'll also take a brief look at examples for IPR relating to service business models.