Imagine a fence built around your office. To be able to protect your secrets, you need to understand how people can get at them. That kind of security wouldn't be needed if people didn't try to steal the recipe. The new FireKing digital safe weighs more than 770 pounds and is encased in two feet of concrete with a 24-hour video and motion-detection surveillance system. KFC recently built a brand new, high-tech home for the colonel's handwritten Original Recipe from 1940. They are strangers who include the general public and also more sophisticated parties like competitive intelligence professionals, hackers, reporters and competitors.Ĭompanies go to great lengths to protect their prized secrets. They have no legal obligation to hold a company's proprietary information in confidence. But insiders also include third parties such as contract employees, consultants, suppliers and customers. Of course employees are legally obligated to hold a company's proprietary information in confidence and not to copy, disclose or use the information for their own benefit or the benefit of others. Next the C-suite needs to understand who has access to its trade secrets, particularly the difference between corporate insiders and outsiders.Ĭorporate insiders are people and organizations with a legal obligation to the company. If a competitor learned about those failed attempts alone, it might still save a lot of research and development time. Not only is that formula a trade secret, but so are the formulas and work that went into the preceding 39 attempts. , the product's name comes from the 40th try by scientists in 1953 to come up with a "water displacement" formula for a rust-prevention solvent and degreaser for the aerospace industry. That may encompass customer identities and pricing information, current research projects and even failed projects. For the C-suite, trade secrets include any privileged information that can provide your company with an advantage in the market. If someone figured out a way to replicate its secret recipe and posted the formula on the Internet? So then, what can you do to effectively monitor your trade secrets? How do you ensure your company's secrets are kept safe?įirst you need to understand what a trade secret is, since you can't protect something you don't know you have. If a trade secret is poorly managed a company can quickly lose its competitive advantage: What would happen to
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