There's a minimum standard of IP housekeeping that investors expect

  Posted by IP Manifest

There's a minimum standard of IP housekeeping that investors expect. That was a key finding from our Investing in Digital Assets project funded by the Intellectual Property Office. The good news is that it's not as onerous as you might think.

The way that we tested this was to put a hypothesis to investors, lenders, publishers, lawyers and accountants at our round table sessions and during our one-to-one interviews. To be provocative we suggested that what we termed a "gold" standard was required. Time and again the response came back that for early stage companies something akin to a "bronze" standard was all that was required initially. Once the company grows and is looking for significant sums or acquisition then naturally a higher standard will be required.

You might ask what is meant by a bronze standard. So did we. The primary concern of anyone risking capital or resources on your creative work is that you aren't infringing other people's IP. That's want investors want to see as a bare minimum. The other key finding is that they want to see that from day one of the business. So its never too early to start using the IP Manifest tools to improve your IP housekeeping.