Intellectual Property – helping unlock the value of ideas

Guidance and tools to help small businesses identify, protect, and manage intellectual property

Every business starts with an idea, and every business owns or uses some form of intellectual property (IP). This could include your website, business name, or logo, through to assets such as innovative technologies, know-how, designs, or even a secret recipe. 

What is Intellectual Property?

IP matters. Great ideas are a source of progress, at the core of every good venture. Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) give creators, inventors, and investors the confidence to turn their ideas into reality, realise new opportunities, and adapt to challenges – knowing that their innovation and creativity have protection. 

Just like other forms of property, you can buy, sell, and license IP. IP rights can enable their owner to take action under civil law to try and stop others from replicating, using, importing, or selling their creation. They also help enable consumers to buy with confidence.   
 
By helping new ideas, discoveries, and creations to thrive, an effective IP system advances the health, wellbeing, and prosperity of society, turning world-leading science and ideas into solutions for the public good. This helps bring medicines that protect us, art and music that enrich our lives, and products that we enjoy and rely on every day. 

Understanding IP, and applying that knowledge to make informed decisions about your business, is a critical enabler, especially for SMEs, start-ups, and scale-ups.  

What are the different types of intellectual property and intellectual property rights? 

Registered IP rights require formal application and payment to gain protection, whilst unregistered IP rights are protected by law automatically as soon as you create them. 

The different types of intellectual property are: 

Patents: these protect new inventions and cover how products work, what they do, how they do it, what they are made of, and how they are made. 

Trade marks: these protect your brand and help customers to identify who the goods or services they purchase are provided by. The trade mark could be made up of words, logos, or a combination of both, and can even be sound based, or an animated logo.  

Registered designs: these protect the visual appearance of a product. This includes, for example, 3D aspects such as shape and 2D aspects such as surface decoration. 
 
Unregistered designs: there are two types of unregistered design in the UK. Supplementary unregistered designs protect both 2D and 3D aspects of the appearance of a product. UK unregistered design right protects the 3D shape and configuration of a product. Both types of protection are automatic if the relevant requirements are met. 

Copyright: this protects literature, artistic works, photographs, music, dramatic works, software, databases, films, radio, television broadcast, sound recordings, and published editions. Copyright is an unregistered IP right which is given copyright protection automatically. You do not have to apply or pay a fee.  

Trade secrets: these are unregistered IP rights and are protected by the laws of confidentiality. To keep trade secrets protected, you must establish that the information is confidential and ensure that anyone you share that information with signs a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). If they then tell anyone about it, you may be able to take legal action.  

What should you do to protect your assets?  

As a business it is important that you understand what IP you have within your business and consider how to protect those IP assets.  

Not doing this means you could invest time and money in your business, only to later find the IP already belongs to someone else. You should also do some research to make sure you’re not infringing on someone else’s IP.  

The right tools for the job

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has a wide range of support to help you make informed decisions in respect of your IP.  
 
The IPO’s free online IP for Business tools and training are a great place to begin when you take your business to market, helping SMEs make the most of their ideas. You can learn more about IP rights with the IPO’s IP Equip e-learning tool. This covers the basics of copyright, designs, trade marks, and patents. 
 
Understanding your IP also helps reduce your exposure to business risk, and the IPO recommends undertaking comprehensive IP searches at the outset of any venture. This will help identify potential infringement issues with third parties’ IP at an early stage. A search for registered rights (patent, trade mark or registered design) can help you with this process. 
 
Integrating an IP strategy into your business plans can also play a crucial role when you need to raise finance. The IPO’s IP for Investment tool can help you identify and assess your IP assets in the context of your business strategy.  
 
IP law can be complex. The IPO recommends getting advice from an IP professional at an early stage of your business journey. Expert IP knowledge and support can be accessed through the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) and Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys. 

IPO support

The IPO has a dedicated support programme for businesses which includes workshops and tailored seminars across the UK. Additionally, we regularly post information and guides on our YouTube channel. 

Comprehensive information about our events, guidance, tools, and case studies for business is available on the GOV.UK website. 

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