Intellectual assets come in all shapes and sizes. Traditionally and almost instinctively, we limit the notion of intellectual property (IP) to patents and possibly throw in trademarks, copyrights, or other valuable assets readily afforded governmental protection. However, the truth is that the most prominent, critical, and vulnerable forms of intellectual property are the processes used by your organization every day. These morsels of IP are usually overlooked and often bleed out of the company without notice.
The most often neglected and vulnerable aspect of Intellectual Property is Know-How. In simple terms, know-how is the unique internal methodology that your organization applies in the production of products, services, or discovery that your competitors may not. Know-how may be in the way product features are validated, customer calls are managed, products are packaged, talent is developed, or how data is curated. No doubt that there are numerous unique aspects to the way you do business that you want to maintain and leverage over the long term. These represent the cumulative know-how that constitutes your special recipe for success.
Know-how can be unique in that it is rarely easy to duplicate. It is often tied to a mature company culture or the fruit of generational learning making the historical context key to successful application. Without the experiential context, the know-how might not make intuitive sense to outsiders. It is more often the transition of employees in and out of the organization that puts know-how at risk.
The foundation of every Lean journey includes the identification and documentation of our essential processes. The documentation is then used to evaluate and improve the standard process. This may sound trite, but without clear procedures we encourage our workforce to develop their own methods, introducing incredible variance and errors into our workflows. If multiple means of performing a process exist, the process will always be sub-optimized and inefficient, denying us the advantages we need to outperform the competition. Critical processes must be prescribed and should be optimized around parameters that are important to the mission of the business.
There are a multitude of ways to document processes; from Value Stream Maps to process flow charts, ISO procedures to standardized work instructions. Whatever you choose, you are committing your know-how to a concrete form that can readily be benchmarked, improved upon, and even protected. Being vague is not in your best interest in this instance. Concise and unambiguous procedures will offer you the best legal evidence in the event your know-how has been compromised.
Companies are typically adept at reminding departing employees about their legal obligations with patented IP. Not so with know-how. Clearly documented know-how and procedures are items that we should carefully educate our employees regarding. They need to appreciate the legal nature of know-how in order to stem its unintentional transfer if they eventually move on.
Protecting our know-how is not rocket science, but it must be done deliberately, proactively, and with care. Take a moment and consider what know-how your organization finds valuable. From the C-suite to the shop floor, know-how is vulnerable to loss if proper care is not taken to preserve it.
Lean In and Lean On.