Take good care of your assets

What are intangible assets?

"Intangible assets, or knowledge assets, include everything from research data and team culture to healthcare methods and new technological solutions. These are assets you can't physically touch – they reside in people's minds, 'between the walls' of the lab, or are the result of creativity and ingenuity. When managed strategically, intangible assets can lead to career success, new business opportunities, healthcare improvements, and enhanced quality of life for citizens."

How can you manage intangible assets strategically?

"Strategic management of intangible assets involves identifying, controlling, and utilising them to achieve your goals. It's rarely enough to come up with an idea – you need to actively spread the idea and often develop it into a product or service for it to be useful. The path from idea to innovation can look very different depending on the intangible assets involved."

How does intellectual property play a role?

"Controlling intangible assets means securing the legal rights to use them. Intellectual property rights provide the exclusive right to prevent others from using an intangible asset you have created. With such exclusive rights, you decide who can do what with the asset. Patents, copyrights, trademarks, and design registrations are all examples of different intellectual property rights. If you need to use an intangible asset that you did not create yourself, you must determine whether someone else holds an intellectual property right to the asset in question. If this is the case, you will need to obtain permission from the rights holder to use the asset."

What should researchers consider?

"The teacher's exemption means researchers own the intangible assets, including research results, they create in their roles. The researcher decides what will happen with the results. This is a great opportunity but can also be seen as a significant responsibility since it largely falls on the individual researcher to manage and utilise the knowledge assets, with the help of intellectual property rights and other tools."

What support is available?

"UU Innovation offers support in identifying and developing new solutions from your research results. It can be difficult to know which knowledge assets can benefit others, and often the results need to be packaged differently than, for example, publications to become something people can gather around and use. Together with us, the researcher can plan the steps in the earliest phases of their idea development and get help with intellectual property issues, such as patenting or managing copyrights."

Sara Gredemark