Protect step-by-step product, service or invention

If you have an idea for a completely new product, service or invention , you want to protect it. Until the moment it is ready for the market, someone else can run away with your idea. With these steps, you can protect your product, service or invention.

1. Find out if your idea already exists

Investigate whether your idea for a product, service or invention is really new. You do this before you work out the idea. If your idea already exists, then recording or registering no longer makes sense. There are different ways to investigate that.

• You can check in various databases whether something already exists. Which database you need depends on what you want to check. You check a brand or logo in a database other than a technical invention.
• Search for the same ideas through the internet, stores and web stores. Maybe your product or invention is already for sale?
• Visit trade fairs and read (online) professional literature about new products and services. This way you know for sure that nobody is already working on the same idea.

2. Do market research

Suppose your new product or service does not yet exist. Do people want to have it or use it? With market research, you get an answer to this. You can then decide whether you want to invest time and money in working out your idea.

3. Decide what exactly you want to protect

Intellectual Property (IP) is the collective name for rights to detailed new ideas and creative concepts. You can protect your product or service with multiple rights. To know what right you have, you must know exactly what you want to protect. For example, a new product may have a new technique for which you can apply for a patent. But it can also have a new name (trademark right) or design (design right). There are rights that you get by depositing or registering. And there are rights that you automatically get. Investigate which rights play a role for you.

4. You are not yet going to work out your idea: record it

You cannot protect an idea for a new product, service or invention with an intellectual property right. For example, an idea for a book. You can only protect it with IE if you are going to implement the idea (see step 5). If you are not going to work out your idea yet, you can . You can use it to show that you came up with it.

5. You work out your idea: register your Intellectual Property

You legally protect your elaborated idea by recording various components:

• Register the name or logo of your company, product or service in the trademark register
• Register a design or design in the model register
• Submit a patent (also called patent) for a technical invention.

6. You do not (yet) register your idea

If you have not (yet) registered and protected your product, service or invention. And you share important business information with, for example, investors or staff. Then you can use a confidentiality statement. Investors and staff sign a contract to keep certain business information secret. Trade secrets for which you actually take measures to keep them secret are covered by the Trade Secrets Protection Act. For example, if someone steals or reveals your trade secret, you can go to court.

7. Market your idea

Have you protected your new product, service or invention and do you want to put it on the market? Read How InventHelp can Help You Protect Your Invention , thus helping you in introducing to the market.