Intellectual Property Asset Management programme designed to raise awareness of the value of tangible/intangible assets to enable them to enter new markets.
The Intellectual Property Asset Management programme is designed to raise awareness of the value of tangible and intangible intellectual assets within a business, and to help West Midlands SMEs improve their competitiveness and sustainability by identifying and unlocking their existing and potential assets to enable them to enter new markets.
This programme funded under ERDF previous programme was delivered by Coventry University Enterprises. Companies were supported in 2 phases:
Phase 1 a Free company IPR audit
Phase 2 a grant to support IPR needs up to £7k to make sure the company protected their products/services before the entered new markets.
IPR audits were used in particular to identify potential infringement, possible areas of IP exploitation and to create alternative revenue streams. This meants to idetify all relevant IP, where the ownership rights lie and the best methods of protection.
Once the needs identified in phase 1, a possible grant for phase 2 and the filing or implementation of IPRs filing was carried out with the company.
Resources needed
Resources centre on having the specialist team of IPR experts able to advise and guide companies in this area.
The cost of the IPR expert would depend on expertise but in the region of £60k. The team included 5 IPR auditors.
Grants of up to £7K were 50% funded by ERDF
Evidence of success
Out of the funded allocated £137500 was allocated to grant, about £600k was contributing towards staff time and £20k was used to prepare events and raise awareness.
The ouputs were the following:
150 audits were conducted with companies
50 projects were created based on the audits
200 SMEs interactions during the lifetime of the project
Potential for learning or transfer
IPR is very valuable and quite often not considered by SMEs. The support offered through this Good Practice could be easily transferable into other regions given the availability of experts. It has the potential to add on to existing programmes and services for SMEs. The IPR Audit is a specific tool which could offer other regions potential to learn from.
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Tags: Micro, Finance, Support, SME, Internationalisation
