United Kingdom: Trade Secrets

For many businesses, the biggest threat to a future investment, acquisition or exit is not financial performance but whether they can clearly evidence ownership and control of the assets driving value. Increasingly, those assets are intellectual property, software, data and digital infrastructure, yet many organisations have far less clarity on ownership than leadership teams realise.

With the explosion of AI and machine learning in the MedTech and Digital Health sectors, trade secrets are becoming an increasingly valuable tool to complement patents in protecting companies’ intellectual property (“IP”). While patents remain central to protecting core technological innovations, trade secrets offer distinct and different advantages that make them particularly well suited for protecting certain types of MedTech and Digital Health assets.

Most of us start in research with big dreams—curing cancer, tackling climate change, creating something that matters.