How to protect your intellectual property?

If you are merely worried about protecting your brand, patents, and other intellectual property, the following story should come as a shock. According to the International Herald Tribune, a company in China literally set up a parallel NEC brand in the country with links to about 50 factories in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This was not one of those basic operations in which a company reverse-engineers your product and starts selling fake products through underground channels. This group of people actually developed a complete line of consumer electronics under the NEC brand and then coordinated manufacturing and distribution while the NEC offices in China and Japan had no clue.

NEC, as you might know, is a global conglomerate (~$50 billion in sales; 140,000 employees) and had all the conventional systems in place to protect its intellectual assets but they never expected something like this to happen. They learnt about the scam only when they received complaints about products that they did not even know were sold under their brand name.

So what can you do?

Doing business successfully and profitably in a flattening world is not just completing the paperwork with the local government to protect your intellectual property. In addition to that you may need a full-fledged investigation and enforcement infrastructure to protect it since authorities in most countries outside the OECD do not have the systems that we expect them to have.

To develop a better understanding of these challenges and how you can navigate them, I invite you to listen to Ashley Wills, Senior International Business Advisor at WilmerHale (focusing on India and South Asia). His understanding of the business and legal environment has not been gathered from books and travel - he has actually lived in India for three years.