Introduction
Protection of innovation is a key element in promoting the development or growth of entrepreneurship activities. For an entrepreneur to reap from their innovative ideologies there must be adequate measures in place for preventing actions that encourage imitations.
Entrepreneurs can prevent imitations in various ways such as the use of standard patent, trademarks and patents among many others. This document, therefore, is going to explicate the various ways that enterprises use to prevent imitations.
Standard Patent
An entrepreneur can protect a method, process or device that he or she has creatively developed by acquiring patent rights (Australian government 2003). For example, cochlear company has patent rights on its ear device designed for the deaf, in various countries to protect imitations. This is an effective barrier to stop others form manufacturing, reproducing of commercializing this device unless upon proper authorization by the company.
Innovative patent
An innovative patent protects small entrepreneurs who cannot afford standard or normal patents (Australian government 2003). This protection is suitable for businesses, which have short commercial or existence period. Considering advantages, innovative patent are reasonably inexpensive as compared to the standard patent.
Additionally, innovative patents are easily obtainable and further take relatively less time to acquire. Ultimately, innovative patents offer equal level of protection as the standard patent thus similar in terms of effectiveness.
Trademarks
One can define a trademark as a symbol, letter, picture, logo, packaging or a combination of these aspects, which differentiates a company’s goods or services from the rest in the market (Australian government 2003). For example, the word “Coca Cola” is a trademark for the renowned beverage organization.
This, therefore, means that no other organization can use this name for any other reason without obtaining consent or permission of Coca Cola organization. The advantage of a trademark is that it protects or safeguards your brand in various ways.
Design
Registered designs protect an entrepreneur from imitations of his or her product outlook (Australian government 2003). Perfect examples of designs include product configurations and features. For instance, bed sheets with Ken Done designs are registered. This prevents or deters anyone from reproducing or manufacturing the same pattern or design. The use any registered design without permission is punishable legally.
Copyright
Copyright protects an entrepreneur’s original work such as music, art, broadcasts, literature, films and computer programmes (Australian government 2003). Copyright prevents anyone from unauthorized copying of another’s creative work. Some of the protected works under copyright include music, artwork, literature, drawing, poems, and novels among other material.
Circuit layout rights
Circuit layout right provides entrepreneurs exclusive rights to manufacture copy and commercially reproduce the original layout design of integrated circuit and microchips.
Trade secrets and confidentiality
This is whereby an entrepreneur maintains secrets of his or her trading activities, commodities or processes (Australian government 2003). For instance, Coca Cola organization is the only organization that knows its product recipes thus limiting assuring protection confidentiality. Conversely, organizations use trade secret when there are complications in reversing engineering process or when there is complexity enforcing intellectual properties.
Explicating barriers and protection to innovation
One of the most successful companies that have managed to, fully, exercise barriers in preventing imitations is Coca Cola organization (Brown & Severson 2011). No person or company has ever imitated Coca Cola’s soft drink recipes. It is a trade secret and thus confidential to Coca Cola.
The Coca Cola organization has also trademarked the name Coca Cola to prevent the organization from any imitation. The trade secret and confidentiality of Coca Cola’s recipes has been one of the most successful barriers or protection against imitations (Brown & Severson 2011).
This is because the reverse engineering of the process is extremely difficult and the combination of the ingredients maintained as top secret. The Coca Cola brand has grown thus recognized worldwide due to the consistency of the Coca Cola soft drink (Brown & Severson 2011).
Various competitors wish to imitate the brand in order to attract more potential customers the market, but often end up in vain. This clearly indicates the effectiveness of imitation barriers imposed by the company. Intellectual property poses immense challenges in management due to its intangibility nature.
Therefore, for effective management of intellectual property, it is fundamental to uphold various protection measures. For instance, keeping a catalogue of all intellectual properties registered can help provide evidence of ownership. Evaluation of the intellectual property regularly can also assist in establishing the property values thus protect then using various available and appropriate ways (Australian government 2003).
The choice of barrier to use in protecting or safeguarding intellectual property will entirely depend on the nature of product or service offered by entrepreneurs. He or she must establish the suitability of that particular barrier in relation to his or her product or service.
The effectiveness of a barrier on a product or a service depends on the nature of the product or service. If a barrier does not suit the product or service, then it will be ineffective in protection or safeguarding of intellectual properties.
In conclusion, barriers to imitation are incredibly vital in the protection of intellectual property. This motivates entrepreneurs in developing new ideologies thus promoting innovations al every organizational level. However, there are various ways of protecting innovation; some of the ways include intellectual properties, copyright, trademarks and design (Australian government 2003).
Such protection assures complete or absolute benefits of their ideologies when they commercially exploited them. Imitation barriers also help in the development of brands in the market.
References
Australian government, 2003, intellectual property (IP) rights at a glance, (commonwealth government of Australia), Australian government, Sydney.
Australian government, 2003, IP management, (commonwealth government of Australia), Australian government, Sydney.
Australian government, 2003, IP valuation, (commonwealth government of Australia), Australian government, Sydney.
Brown, R & Severson, K (2011), Recipe for coke? One more to add to the file, New York Times. Web.