The following tips will help you to effectively manage your valuable intellectual capital.

Consider protecting your innovations and creations as intellectual property (IP). Industrial property rights, i.e. trade marks, patents and designs as well as copyright, provide the best protection against any possible misuse.
Protect your IP at an early stage. This will prevent competitors, for example, from registering your ideas as their intellectual property and thereby limiting your scope for doing business.
Ensure that your products or services do not infringe others’ IP rights. In this way, you can avoid receiving a formal warning or your product being taken off the market and having to pay damages.
Use publicly accessible information to your advantage Carrying our searches in trade mark and patent databases can inspire you or help you to determine the novelty of your invention or to monitor the competition.
Turn your IP into cash You can sell trade marks, patents, designs and copyright or give permission to others to use them in exchange for a licence fee.

IP rights are not mandatory – however, effective management of IP certainly is.

Have also a look to the checklist IP strategy.

How to make the most of your intellectual property