Intellectual property
Definition
Intellectual property is Explicit knowledge assets that are protected by law including patents, trademarks, copyrights, licenses
Description
Intellectual property (IP) is an intangible asset that has commercial value. In nuclear R&D organizations the development of IP is a key deliverable of the organization and as such should be protected. As well as physical assets such as designs, inventions, software etc. ‘employee know-how’ is also regarded as IP. In fact the value of employee know-how in many R&D organizations far outweighs the value of physical assets. Protecting all kinds of IP involves:
- Taking an inventory of existing IP;
- Assessing IP value;
- Implementing controls on high value items and then integrating these controls into the management system.
Taking an inventory of ‘employee know-how’ is essentially the same task as identifying critical knowledge in the organization, hence there is an obvious linkage here with the KM tools and techniques described in Section 6 of this publication.
- Applicable organizational functions;
- All types of R&D organization, but with particular relevance to:
- Applied research functions;
- Design R&D functions;
- Technical support & services functions.
- All types of R&D organization, but with particular relevance to:
- Related KM tools/techniques to consider:
- Identification of critical knowledge;
- Knowledge loss risk assessment;
- Succession planning;
- Tacit knowledge capture;
- Explicit knowledge search/find;
- IT tools to facilitate the techniques above.
