If a company is solid it means that it has built its foundation on good intuition. When we talk about start-ups, however, how much do we need to patent an idea?
Start-ups
are activities that are explicitly requested to stand out for innovation.
Therefore, we have reason to fear that the idea behind our business may be
stolen from us. In fact, we can say that today an idea counts more than a
product with an entrepreneurial history already underway and investors are very
easily interested in it.
The question is therefore legitimate: can we patent our start-up today let's try to shed
some light on the subject.
What
is the patent?
Few
people really know what a patent is, or at least what are the dynamics moved by
its ancient regulations. The patent is a certificate that allows the owner of
an idea to become its legitimate father. In practice, however, paternity
remains inapplicable on the idea and therefore is extended to the process that
allows the intuition to become something concrete. Ultimately, therefore, the
patent allows the inventor of a product or service to claim the rights.
Why
patent a startup?
The
start-up is not only the result of an idea (if so we would all be successful
entrepreneurs), but of sacrifice, ingenuity, skills and above all investments.
At the base of an activity that finds a way to see the light there are
investments or loans that need to be restored. For this reason, it is legitimate
to want to protect the fruit of so much sweat from the competition. If the
intentions are reasonable, however, they cannot always lead us to certain solutions:
in this case, for example, we must consider that only some things can be
patentable.
What
can be patented and what cannot
As we
have said, contrary to what many believe, it is not possible to patent registration
an idea but rather the process that leads it to become a product in all
respects. What does this mean? Let's say it comes to mind to create a cake with
green tea and rose petals. However creative, intuition alone will not be
patentable. To obtain the patent can be the cake or the procedure to obtain it
from nothing, then the recipe.
There is
another requirement, however, to be respected: only what can have real
applicability in the industrial world is patentable. Scientific discoveries,
for example, are out of the competition but the procedure for deriving a given
system is not. In the case of a start-up, you can therefore patent your product
but not the idea from which it was derived.
