“Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana,” commented Microsoft’s Bill Gates. So why should laboratory managers worry about keeping intellectual property confidential? Gates’ statement may be true for computers and information technology. However, in many other business areas, intellectual property can have a much longer shelf life and needs to remain confidential for many years, often as trade secrets. Well-known examples of long-lived trade secrets include the formula for Coca-Cola or the Colonel’s eleven herbs and spices used in original-recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Companies need to protect their intellectual property if they are to use it to obtain competitive advantage. Intellectual property includes methods of making new compounds, product formulations, catalyst compositions, and design of production equipment and laboratory instruments. It also can include sales data, business agreements with other firms, and business plans. Commercial information such as customer lists, products that customers purchase, names of individual contacts at customer firms, etc., may also be trade secrets.
Nearly all laboratory managers, scientists, engineers, and other employees sign a confidentiality agreement when first employed. This is a legal document—a contract between the organization and the employee. In signing, employees agree to keep company intellectual property confidential. Laboratory employees often have access to and use confidential intellectual property more than most employees. So laboratory managers need to be sure their staff members understand what the confidentiality agreement legally binds them to do. Even experienced employees inadvertently and sometimes knowingly share or even sell the confidential intellectual property of their employer. A January 2011 issue of C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) carried two stories of high-profile 2010 incidents in which laboratory employees shared their employers’ confidential intellectual property with outsiders. In the first, a senior DuPont Company researcher included confidential company information in a review article published in a journal. In the second, a researcher shared confidential information from a previous employer with his current one. I have overheard people discussing obviously confidential research information in airport departure lounges and on airplanes.
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