At our meeting yesterday at our Bushey Breakfast Networking Group. Chris Smith was our guest speaker from the Intelectual Property Office. An audience of business owners were keen to find out more about protecting what for some are adaptly described as intanagable assets of a business but are in themselves extremely valuable to every company.

In this education session Chris explained the five main areas covering Patients, Trade Marks, Designs, Copyright and Trade Secrets. For a complex subject he managed to to explain each area in a easy and understable way by giving examples of how companies want to protect the name of their products, fuctiionality, logos etc. Some classic examples were used  to illustrate this where major players will go to court to protect any of the five areas. For the samller business all of these are equally important and it is recommended  you do something called an IP Audit which goes into the mix if you ever wanted to sell your company.

Chris handed out a free 40 page booklet to all the SB alliance attendess entitled IP basics which gives a comprehensive guide to all the subjects discussed. Needless to say there were countles questions from our attendess.There is also a helpline 0300 300 2000 for advice on IP and you can also check out their website http://www..gov.uk/ipo

Our next fortnightly SB alliance Business Breakfast meeting held at the Banqueting Suite, Bushey Country Club , Bushey is Thursday 18th February from 7.15-9.30 am. For further details and to book phone 079 1906 6053.

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