Intellectual Property - Intelligence & Security

Hiding activities

Yes, industrial espionage is a problem for all high-technology enterprises. And not only in-house activities (R&D) are targets but also your activities and behaviour regarding external sources.

It is for sure that a competitor who is getting the knowledge about you doing information research within patent literature or regarding the technological state-of-the-art for a specific topic or a detailed technology, that this competitor will without any doubt be able to imagine what you might plan. This can very early interfere with your aim to protect your inventions and to hide your steps for future market activities.

So, information security is not covered by worrying about sending emails or the power of your internet firewalls. Information security is not just a hardware/software problem (even if most IT-suppliers may give this impression). Professional and efficient information security is covered by a general company strategy, including behavioural guidelines, staff training and an overall awareness of information value.

And integrated part of that strategy must be to think about your information research activitites. Always keep in mind that the fact that one of your employees is interested in some specific information is already an information for others, too.

How to solve this problem? A most efficient solution for hiding your activities is to 'neutralize' information research by letting professional partners (infobrokers, e.g.) like scitari do it for you. If an independent information researcher is looking for something others should not be able to trace the origin of the request.

But then an additional player is on the field and might be security problem himself. So, you should at least attach importance to some points before you are going to outsorce your activities ...

• Talk to the information research partner, and see if you get an impression of his reliability.
• Have a look on the partners strategies to avoid tracing back to you. For example: Are information research data and customer data separated physically at your partners side? How and how long are the data stored? What happens to them afterwards?
• Check that the number of people having knowledge about the project on your information research partners side is limited to a minimum.
• Make sure that your information research partner instructs his employees for information security.
• Supply your information research partner with a list of contacts that must not be contacted during the investigations (for example for interviews).
• Ask for interest conflicts (does the partner already work for your competitor?).
• Make a contract with your partner, that includes a paragraph covering information security (agreement to silence, confidential disclosure agreement (CDA), e.g.).

If you would like to know more about information research security, do not hesitate to contact Dr. Christian Velten at scitari.

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