Protect Your Company’s Innovations With These 4 Tips

[This article was written by Meghan Belnap.]

No matter what size your company is, unique innovations that are born within your company are a critical asset to your company’s success. To protect this success, therefore, means protecting the innovations behind the success. In today’s world of interconnectivity, safeguarding any type of property can seem like a daunting task. To help overcome the challenges involved, here are four tips to protect your company’s innovations.

Encrypt Communications

Unencrypted communications put your company at risk in a variety of ways. Beyond putting innovations at risk, you also risk the exposure of private information about employees and customers, which could put you at risk of a lawsuit if you’re found to be liable for the leak.

Therefore, it’s crucial that you use encrypted emails for all company communications, especially those related to any sensitive information. You’ll also want to extend this encryption to employee phones to ensure they don’t accidentally share sensitive information when they’re away from work.

Protect Your Intellectual Property

Most innovations fall under the category of intellectual property. Given this reality, it’s crucial that you take steps to protect your company’s intellectual property from those who would seek to capitalize on your carelessness. Intellectual property protection attorneys can help you discern which types of protections are available for various innovations, ensuring that any infractions of these protections are able to be prosecuted to the fullest extent.

Keep Work Areas Secured

If there are areas within your facility where sensitive information is stored, it’s important to protect these areas from being entered by unauthorized personnel. Whether it’s an employee who isn’t a part of a particular project or it’s a curious customer who wanders into an area they shouldn’t be, there are many threats to sensitive information that must be considered. By utilizing coded locks or locks requiring some type of radio frequency identification, you ensure that the information stays secure against even sophisticated and determined criminals.

Update Patents and Copyrights

While patents and copyrights provide a valuable tool in the quest to protect intellectual property, they aren’t perfect. One major shortcoming is that they must be updated on a regular basis to provide maximum protection. The onus for updating these protective devices falls on those who applied for them, meaning it’s your company’s responsibility to update copyrights and patents as changes are made to the innovations or as any older copyrights and patents get set to expire.

The best way to protect any type of sensitive information within your company is to determine early on in the process who needs access to that information. By defining a clear subset of people who will need to access the information, it will enable you to be more effective as you design protections against those who don’t need access.

Author Bio:

Meghan Belnap is a freelance writer who enjoys spending time with her family. She loves being in the outdoors and exploring new opportunities whenever they arise. Meghan finds happiness in researching new topics that help to expand her horizons. You can often find her buried in a good book or out looking for an adventure. You can connect with her on Facebook right here and Twitter right here.