Knowledge Packaging and Knowledge Protections

Knowledge Protection: The Tool For Commercialization

Since knowledge can create the advantage in the market, it is important that it cannot be stolen or taken by the competition. Knowledge that can be easily copied is of little strategic value as it gives only a short-term advantage in the market.

Therefore, knowledge must be defined and protected (Porath, 2010; Fuller and Hohman, 2010; Kundu, Bhar, and Pandurangan, 2015; Badea, Tanasecu, Marin, Stephanescu, Vladut, Bucur, Ciocanel and Ivan, 2015; Vinig, and Lips, 2015), and the protection can affect the ability to successfully utilize the knowledge and transfer it. Let us take a moment and look at our drug example from above. The approval process for a drug is lengthy and costly. To go through the entire process and then to find out that since the drug composition and manufacturing cannot be protected, it can be copied by the competition, means that no company would take upon itself the approval of such a drug candidate. A firm that would do such a thing would not be able to recuperate the development and approval costs quickly enough to avoid going under. Therefore, if you want your drug candidate to have any chance in the future of reaching the market, the knowledge related to it must be protected from the competition from the first time that there is any knowledge worth protecting.

So, the protection is there in order to allow the firms that take the knowledge and invest in turning it into a marketable product (process or service would be similar, so we shall focus on a product), by making sure that at least for a period the firm taking the knowledge would be exempt from competition and thus the new knowledge will allow it to produce enough economic gain to justify the cost and effort invested in the new product.

Figure 1.

Knowledge protection cycle