ThemeGovernance, Legal & Risk
CardCard 28 of 66
Questions5 to explore

Intellectual property

Trademarks, design rights & patents

The ideas, names, designs, and methods your organization creates can be its most durable assets, but only if you know what you have and have taken steps to protect it.

Intellectual property covers a range of things: the trademark on a name or logo, a patent on a method or device, copyright in creative work, design rights in a product's appearance, and trade secrets in proprietary processes. Most organizations hold more of this than they realize, and fewer organizations than you would expect have documented any of it.

The documentation work here is partly legal and partly practical. Legally, you need records of when something was created, by whom, and under what terms, especially for work done by contractors or employees where ownership could be disputed. Practically, you need someone to know what the organization has registered, where it is registered, and when renewals are due.

For small companies, this often starts with the trademark on the business name and the copyright in the core product. Those two are worth getting right even before anything else is formalized.

What to capture

For this part of the company brain, what is worth writing down and keeping current. The goal is not a complete archive but a living record that new people can read and returning people can trust.

Registered rights

A list of everything formally registered: trademarks, patents, design rights, domain names, including jurisdiction, registration number, and renewal date.

Ownership clarity

Which IP is owned by the company versus licensed in, and for work created by contractors, whether the agreements actually transfer ownership.

Core trade secrets

Proprietary methods, formulas, or processes the organization depends on, and how access to them is controlled and documented.

Third-party licenses

Licenses the organization holds for software, fonts, images, or other IP it uses but does not own, including any usage restrictions.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What does the organization own that a competitor could not simply copy tomorrow?
Are the trademarks on your name and logo registered in the markets where you operate?
For work done by freelancers or agencies, do your contracts explicitly assign ownership of the output to the company?
When do your registered rights expire, and who is responsible for renewing them?
Is there proprietary knowledge that exists only in one or two people's heads and has never been written down?

Things to notice

A contractor who built your core product may legally own the copyright in it unless the contract explicitly transferred those rights to you, even if you paid for the work.
Trademarks registered in one country do not automatically protect you in another, which matters the moment you start operating across borders.
Trade secrets lose their legal protection if they are not actually kept secret, so undocumented access to sensitive methods and processes is both a security risk and a legal one.