Educational center

Startup educational program

A startup is a new commercial project designed to find and implement a scalable business model. Every startup starts with an idea. Moreover, to be called a startup, the idea at its core must be original and brand new. During startup development, this idea gives rise to a new product or service. Therefore, among the many tasks faced by a startup, we single out two – the search for investments and the protection of ideas.

Although today the “chicken-egg” dilemma, i.e. what should be done first – attraction of investments for development or protection of intellectual property, has not even come close to a solution, we at Intectica believe that investors look at the intellectual property of a startup as a sign of ambition, innovation, and promising initiative. Investors want to know that a company is able to keep competitors off its market by means of patents, trademarks, and copyrights, or that it can monetize its intellectual property through licensing.

For example, a 2019 analysis by the European Union Patent Office found that startups with at least one registered intellectual property object (whether a patent, trademark, or copyright) were 21% more likely to transit to the next growth stage and 10% more likely to become a high-growth firm.

Indeed, a young company often cannot attract investors without intellectual property protection. But at the same time, it needs funding to get this protection. Intellectual property for startups falls into four main categories – patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Therefore, the main goal of a startup in the field of intellectual property is to identify its strategic objects and protect them by means of an appropriate tool at the lowest possible costs.

Our educational program for Startups is designed to help to identify your strategic assets and the tools to protect them, and in addition to teach:

How to legally properly issue intellectual property rights between partners and employees and not to repeat the mistakes of Mark Zuckerberg;

How to research the intellectual property market for your startup, find out your competitors and how not to violate their intellectual rights;

At what stage of the startup is it better to start protecting intellectual property;

What means of intellectual property are applied – patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets or their combination;

What aspects of a startup are protected by patents, what comes after trademarks, when to register copyrights, and how to use trade secrets;

What are necessary steps before scaling a startup and entering new markets.

We are waiting for you if:

You are the author of a startup project,

You feel difficulty in protecting your authorship;

You want to learn how to use intellectual property as a means of attracting investors;

You want to restrain your competitors as much as possible.

Startups face challenges on many fronts – product development, company building, hiring and retention, marketing, and securing funding. If a number of these issues can be solved independently, then it is more appropriate to delegate intellectual property to specialists, especially if you will use it as a tool to interest investors.

Education for business owners

Almost every business, no matter how small, owns some form of intellectual property that is not a tangible asset, but is sometimes much more valuable than tangible ones.

In general, the company’s assets can be divided into two broad categories – tangible assets and intangible assets. While a tangible one is a physical asset such as machinery or property, an intangible one is a non-physical asset such as a company’s prestige, reputation or intellectual property.

The term “intellectual property” covers several different forms, which, as the name suggests, are the result of human creative and intellectual activity. There are four main forms of intellectual property: (1) copyrights, (2) trademarks, (3) patents, and (4) trade secrets.

Many business owners assume that intellectual property is only something that high-flying Silicon Valley startups need to worry about. But the truth is that every business owner needs to protect their creative assets because every business inevitably possesses intellectual property of one kind or another. For example, the text content of your company’s website, promotional and marketing materials – flyers, catalogs or photos, text documents for customers, etc. can be protected by copyright.

Unfortunately, businesses often neglect to register their intellectual property or simply do not want to spend financial resources on it. That is why they often get into trouble and pay dearly for it. For example, a company decides to rebrand and hires a design agency to develop a new logo, but does not formalize the transfer of intellectual rights to the logo. In this case, without taking additional measures, the copyright of the logo may remain with the designer who created it, and not with the business that uses it. And there can be many such scenarios.

Today, the top three reasons businesses fail to protect this valuable intangible asset are:

– ignorance of the potential benefits of intellectual property protection;

– insufficient knowledge in this area;

– the cost of obtaining protection.

Our education program for business owners is designed to help you identify your intellectual property and in addition learn to:

Legally correct formalize relations between you and your partners, employees, contractors who provide the results of their creativity, and distributors;

Gain competitive advantages with the help of your intellectual property;

Earn from licensing your creative assets;

Properly use patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets or combinations thereof;

Monitor the market for infringement of your intellectual rights;

Distinguish between a trademark and a trade name and ways of protecting both;

Use ©, ™ and ® marks;

Apply intellectual property to develop recognition and prestige;

Use intellectual property as a means of attracting partners;

Apply intellectual property when transferring or selling a business;

Sell and formalize the transfer of rights to your intellectual property.

We are waiting for you if:

You are a business owner;

Do not have any registered intellectual property object or wish to increase your intellectual portfolio;

Want to secure creative and intellectual property for the company, not individuals;

Want to earn on your intellectual property.

Women business educational club

Dear Ladies!

Those who know English at least a little, have ideas and want to build a business, stayed in Ukraine or currently live in Europe!

We invite you to join our Club for businesswomen and, true together with us, build the future and make dreams come.

A lot of research has already been devoted to the role of women in business. We will not delve into them, but will only emphasize that according to the data of the company She’s Next Empowered, 9 out of 10 businesses owned by Ukrainian women offer goods and services only within their own country. At the same time, 100% of businesswomen are interested in learning how to run business abroad.

A typical modern Ukrainian business woman is a woman of 30-50 years old, who received a higher education and even more than one, is married and has children. She is in constant development, in search of new knowledge and skills and receives them through specialized business trainings or self-development.

However, even with this background, women still lack access to finance, communication channels and mentor leaders.

Therefore, it is for you that we have united successful and ambitious women and created programs for the development of your entrepreneurial potential, the application of your talent, skills and creative approach for the sake of a better future for women.

Our club will help you realize that you can create and develop a business regardless of gender, age, social status, education, change of the country and other socially imposed “obstacles”, and in addition:

Find motivation for action and moral support,

Combine professional life with the role of wife and mother,

Gain knowledge about the language and cultural environment of the country in which you want to develop,

Understand the peculiarities of the business environment of the country in which you plan to build a business,

Formulate your business idea, outline the target market, analyze competitors and possible business risks,

Learn the basics of entrepreneurial activity,

Learn the clear rules for opening a business and conducting professional activities in European countries,

Get information about investment opportunities and financial support for your business in Europe,

Develop ways of finding customers, suppliers, counterparties, attracting a European audience and creating a professional network,

Receive qualified consultations on the development of business plans, partnership creation, integration and scaling,

Get qualified help at any life stage of your project,

Ensure the recognition of your business with the help of intellectual property tools,

Learn lessons not only from victories, but also from defeats,

And finally, to consolidate the acquired knowledge in our Ukrainian-Bulgarian-German trainings.

We are waiting for you in our club if:

You are a woman,

Just planning to start your own business or are already a businesswoman,

Have moved to any country in Europe and are planning integration into the European business community,

Live in Ukraine and want to realize your entrepreneurial ideas,

Want to expand the geography of activity to European countries,

Have difficulties with “flowing” into the business space.

Register for our programs from the link below and we will definitely inform you about upcoming events.

Let’s build a strong womanhood together!

Pharmaceutical product patent strategy

Pharmaceuticals is the industry where patent protection is most sought after, and patent rights for individual drugs are the most expensive.

This happened because the pharmaceutical industry has one fundamental difference from other high-tech industries – the level of competition in pharmaceuticals is higher, and the level of intra-industry cooperation and interdependence is significantly lower. For example, today none of the largest electronic corporations can bring to the market a promising new model of technology (smartphone, computer, TV, etc.) purely on their own, without cooperation with other companies in the industry. In contrast, new drugs are always the product of one company or a combined group of companies. In this context, pharmaceutical companies’ most valuable assets are patents, as it is essential for patent holders to obtain exclusive rights to an invention to commercialize it, and trademarks to ensure drug and brand recognition.

Patent strategies in the field of pharmaceuticals are characterized as quite strict, that is, market participants seek to stop any attempts to violate their intellectual rights, so that the costs of actions to circumvent patent protection are very expensive, desirably equivalent to the development of new drugs.

For each specific drug, depending on the specifics of its development and application, its own protection strategy is created, since the development is not always devoted to a new molecule, but may relate to the improvement and solution of problems with the finished medicinal product. So, the objects of patents, in addition to a chemical compound, can be:

– method of obtaining a chemical compound;

– microorganisms;

– genetic designs;

– pharmaceutical composition, i.e. the drug itself;

– application method;

– method of treatment, diagnosis and prevention.

At the same time, trademarks most often protect the name of the medicinal product, and industrial designs protect the packaging.

Moreover, it should be remembered that patents, trademarks and industrial designs have a purely local character, that is, they are valid in the country in which they were registered. Therefore, the objects to be protected may differ slightly in different countries.

In general, the patent strategy depends on many factors, such as the size and type of the company (originator, generic), available financial resources, geography of interest, existing competitors, etc. Probably the most famous patent strategy is the “greening” of patents by companies producing original medicinal products, which consists in submitting a large number of patent applications for one medicinal product – applications for a chemical compound, applications for salts of this compound, a method of synthesis, etc. up to several tens, and sometimes several hundreds of applications.

Our educational program on strategic patenting in the pharmaceutical industry is designed to help to identify and improve patenting strategies specifically for your pharmaceutical products and in addition to learn about:

Patent strategies of large pharma companies (not just “evergreening”);

Patent strategies of generic manufacturers;

Ways of bypassing the “patent web”;

Principles of combined protection – combinations of patents, trademarks and industrial designs;

Licensing in the pharmaceutical industry;

The trap of compulsory licensing in the pharmaceutical industry;

Peculiarities of patenting pharmaceutical objects in the countries of your interest.

We are waiting for you if:

You are a representative of the pharmaceutical industry;

Want to acquire or deepen your knowledge in strategic patenting;

want to receive effective tools to restrain competitors.

Digital technologies

Digital technology is anything related to electronic computing and data conversion, i.e. gadgets, electronic devices, software, etc.

The development of digital technologies has brought new challenges to the protection of intellectual property rights. The ease of copying and sharing information on the Internet has made it easier for infringers to use intellectual property without the owner’s consent. At the same time, the unauthorized use and exploitation of digital assets has led to significant financial losses and reputational damage for companies that work with digital technologies.

On the other hand, digital technologies and digitization have brought new challenges to the field of intellectual property, such as the protection of new types of non-traditional trademarks, such as holograms, or purely digital works, such as mobile applications and other software.

Therefore, the protection of intellectual rights has become a top priority for companies that seek to maintain their competitive advantage, protect their brand and not lose financial profits.

To achieve these goals, technology companies must legally protect their intellectual property – primarily the most high-priority objects – through copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, and industrial designs in their national jurisdictions.

In addition, intellectual property protection can be combined with licensing to create a wide range of strategic options for maximizing the value or utility of technology companies’ key assets and providing some control over core value propositions.

Our educational program for intellectual property in digital field is designed to help you identify your intellectual property and to learn to:

Legally correct formalize relations between you and your partners, employees, contractors who provide the results of their creativity, and distributors;

Gain competitive advantages with the help of your intellectual property;

Earn from licensing your creative and digital assets;

Properly use patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets or combinations thereof;

Monitor the market for infringement of your intellectual rights;

Use intellectual property as a means of attracting partners;

Apply intellectual property when transferring or selling a business;

Sell and process the transfer of rights to your intellectual property.

We are waiting for you if:

You are the owner or employee of a technology company;

Do not have any registered intellectual property object or wish to increase your intellectual portfolio;

Want to secure creative and intellectual property for the company;

Want to earn on your intellectual property.

Green industry patent support

Green technology is a kind of an umbrella term that covers technologies, production processes and supply chains that are environmentally friendly, or less harmful compared to traditional ones.

Green technologies include:

– technologies for mitigating the global climate changes;

– technologies for creating and using alternative energy sources;

– technologies for reducing the volume of greenhouse gas produced or its capturing from the atmosphere;

– technologies for processing and reuse;

– technologies of sustainable agriculture.

The awareness of the need to preserve nature, and at the same time, the awareness that the solution to these problems is partly provided by technologies – green technologies, is growing all over the world. Therefore, since the 2010s, society has been actively implementing programs to accelerate the development of green technologies around the world, which include accelerated examination of green patents.

Green patents are patents, the implementation of which will positively affect the environment and society and provide the so-called “environmental benefit”. The main disadvantage of any patent for an invention is the term of its examination, which can take up to 5 years, in some cases even more.

To date, 10 countries – Japan, Great Britain, Canada, Brazil, the USA, Australia, Korea, China, Taiwan – offer authors and applicants to order an accelerated patent application examination for free. Of course, provided that the object falls under the criteria of “greenness”. Thus, the period from filing an application to obtaining a patent is reduced to an average of 1 year. In Canada, for example, an expedited examination can take only a few weeks.

Ukraine, unfortunately, does not yet provide the possibility of accelerated examination of applications for green technologies, however, a resident of any country has the opportunity to apply for a patent in any of the 10 countries using our services and receive all the benefits provided for a green patent.

Our educational program for green technology support is designed to help you understand how you can get a green patent for your development and, in addition, learn:

Peculiarities of green technology market research;

Use of specialized databases to research the market of green technologies and potential partners;

Peculiarities of drawing a patent application in accordance with the requirements of all 10 countries;

Features of the classification of green patents;

Conditions for submitting a patent application in any of 10 countries.

We are waiting for you if:

You are a resident of any country;

Want to patent green technology;

Want to use bonuses for green patents;

Enter the market of another country with your green technology.