London Business Hub's Investment Ready Programme

Central London from Primrose Hill

Author Duncan from Nottingham Licence CC BY SA 2.0  Wikimedia Commons

  

Jane Lambert

The London Business Hub is the business support network for Greater London.  It is one of 38 local growth hubs that have been established across England.  It is delivered by the London Enterprise Action Programme which is the capital's local enterprise partnership.

The Hub offers a wide range of services including assistiance with drawing up business plans, accessing funding, intellectual property and growth and scaling up.  Its latest initiative and the reason for this article is the Hub's Investment Ready Programme which starts on 22 Sept 2022.  This is a programme delivered by Funding London which is sponsored by the British Business Bank.

According to the London Business Hub, attendees will be offered a range of group and one-to-one sessions on developing their business and seeking investment lasting up to 4 hours a week over 6 weeks. To qualify, businesses must have a minimum viable product and a strong business proposition as well as a number of other criteria. There have already been two of these programmes and testimonials from the previous cohorts appear on the programme's website. Applications for the third cohort should be lodged by 31 Aug 2022.  

Any business that is seeking investment whether through this programme or not should have regard to the legal protection of its corporate name and logo and those of its products and services.  If it has developed a new product or process it should consider how to prevent its competitors from making that product or using that service.   If the business is a joint venture there should be an agreement in writing to govern their relationship.   That is particularly important when they receive funding.  Terms for the supply of their goods or services to customers should be drawn up as well as terms for the procurement of goods and services from their suppliers.

Advice on those matters is available through the Hub and I can help too.   For well over 20 years I have been running a pro bono IP and tech law clinic in the North of England but it can be accessed by businesses in the rest of the country including London.    Anyone requiring up to 30 minutes of my time on any of those matters is welcome to  contact me through my "Initial Advice and Signposting Form".

Working with Middlesex

On Monday 3 Feb 2014 I gave a talk on intellectual property to a mixed group of LLM and LLB students and staff at the Hendon campus of Middlesex University. As I had a fairly mixed audience that ranged from academics and professionals specializing in IP to undergraduates I started with a general introduction to IP which covered the topics mentioned in my slides and handout of the 26 June 2013. Stressing the territorial limitations of intellectual property rights I mentioned the intellectual property treaties and the TRIPs agreement. Topics that I had discussed in detail in my presentation to the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce just before Christmas in TRIPS: The Linchpin of the World Intellectual Property System. Finally, I focused on bilateral investment treaties which I introduced in "Bilateral Investment Treaties: Eli Lilly and Co. v Government of Canada" 27 July 2013 NIPC Law and is now the subject of an article that I published in Sweet & Maxwell's EIPR last December (Jane Lambert "Bilateral Investment Treaties: A Remedy for SME?" (Dec 2013) [2013] EIPR 759).

The audience seemed to like my presentation - or at least they were very polite about it - and over lunch with Professor Joshua Castellino, Dean of the Law School, I discussed ways in which my chambers and I could contribute to the already extensive work that the University is doing for its own students and staff and businesses and the wider community in Hendon, North London and beyond.  Possible areas of consolidation include the launch of an inventors club along the lines of the one I already chair in Leeds to transferring the clinics that I operate in chambers to Hendon. I also told Professor Castelino about some of the initiatives that are taking place elsewhere in London such as the British Library's Business and IP Centre.

With some 40,000 students on campuses in London, Dubai, Malta and Mauritius, Middlesex University is a massive institution which already offers a wide range of services for business. These include research and consultancy, technology transfer and knowledge transfer schemes for which various sources of funding are available. The University's clients include some of the largest businesses in the UK including ASDA, Halifax, Royal Mail and Toshiba.

If as is likely my discussions with Prof Castellino and his colleagues bear fruit I shall mention it in this blog. In the meantime should anyone from the University wish to attend the next London IP clinic which will be held in chambers on 26 Feb 2014 he or she should make an appointment with George on 020 7670 1550 or complete our London IP clinics form. If you want to discuss this article you may call me on 020 7404 5252 during normal office hours or you can message me through my contact form. You can also tweet me, write on my wall or send me a message through G+, Linkedin or Xing.

Choosing the Right Kind of IP - Five Top Tips

Jane Lambert

What is Intellectual Property?
As I said in my presentation, "Introduction to Intellectual Property", which you can download here, intellectual property ("IP") is "the collective term for the bundle of laws that protect investment in intellectual assets. ("IA"). In the same presentation I defined intellectual assets as the brands, designs, technology or works of art and literature that give one business a competitive advantage over all others.

Different Ways of protecting IA
Most of those IA can be protected in a variety of ways. For example, you can apply for a patent for a new product or process but you have to the your invention to the world in sufficient detail for anyone with th right skills and experience to make it. That's fine if you get a patent, if t is valid and if you can afford to enforce it but these are three very big ifs,  Alternatively, you can rely on some other IP right such as the the law of confidence, unregistered design right or in some cases confidence.

Patenting does not come cheap.  According to research that had been commissioned by the European Patent Office in 2004 the cost of a typical European patent over 10 years amounted to €32,000. Since a fair proportion  of the patents on the register are never worked, and of those that are worked only a tiny number make serious money for their proprietors, patenting an invention can often be a complete waste of money.

Of course if you really have invented something like Emerson's better mousetrap and the world really is beating a path to your door, then it would be a shame not to have patented the invention.

Five Top Tips
So how do you find the right king of IP protection for your IA? The answer is that it is very difficult but here are some useful tips:

1. When you write your business plan for your business or project, try to identify the income streams for the planning period. Consider the potential threats to those income streams during that period and then think of some possible countermeasures. In most cases, the threats will be commercial rather than legal and most of the countermeasures will be commercial too. If, however, one of those threats is imitation of your product or process by a competitor then maybe you need some kind of legal protection. The appropriate legal protection will depend on the nature of the threat. If your competitor is likely to copy the shape or configuration of your product then maybe some kind of design protection is required. If it is the mechanism of the product that is likely to be imitated then perhaps you need to consider unregistered design right or even patents.
2. An IP right ("IPR") is essentially a title to bring a lawsuit. Except for a handful of infringements that are also criminal offences it is up to the IPR owner to enforce his rights in the civil courts.  Though the cost of IP enforcement has come down considerably with reforms to the Patents County Court litigation is still expensive.  It is important to ensure that you can enforce your IPR which in most cases means taking out specialist IP insurance (see my articles "Intellectual Property Litigation - the Funding Options"  23 April 2013 NIPC Law and "IP Insurance Five Years on" 23 Oct 2010 Inventors Club).
3. You do not have to protect your IA everywhere. If you have no market in Ruritania and nobody is capable of making the product for export there then you do no need patent protection in that state.
4. Make sure that you get the right kind of professional advice for each type of problem. For instance, if you want to apply for a patent you should consult a patent agent (aka patent attorney).  Although it is easier to apply for a registered design or trade mark and many businessmen and women make successful applications without an agent that I would still advise you to seek professional help. Attorneys are specially trained in IP law and practice. Their professions are regulated by the IP Regulation Board. They carry professional indemnity insurance if things go wrong.  If you do not already have a patent or trade mark attorney then we can introduce you to one with whom we have worked well. Alternatively, the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys and the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys have searchable databases on their websites.
5. Before you spend any money on patenting, trade marking or registering a design it is a good idea to devise an IP strategy and perhaps talking to an IP strategist.  IP strategists are a rapidly developing profession in its own right whose practitioners can be members of any of the IP professions (see "What is IP Strategy" 9 Jan 211).

Further Information

If you want to discuss any of these points in greater detail, give me a ring on 020 7404 5252 or fill out my contact form.