Perspective on Trade Secret Values

Getting a Good Perspective On The Value Of Trade Secrets

For entrepreneurs, it is often very hard to get a solid, balanced perspective on their trade secrets.

Part of the problem for the entrepreneur is that they often do not have an experience base to make good judgments about value.  It takes a lot of hard knocks to know which trade secrets have value and which do not.  Even experienced entrepreneurs may only have a handful of product cycles from which to make good judgments.

Individual people in industry – even experienced ones – only have small number of data points from which they make inferences.  In essence, most people have anecdotal evidence only and not statistically valid sample sizes.

For almost every business scenario, there are people who hold diametrically opposed opinions about the best way to proceed.  One person may have been burned by patents and therefore recommends that you never get patent protection.  The next person regretted never getting a patent and always thinks they are a good idea.

Our job here is not to decide which is right or wrong, because that is impossible.  Our job is to remember that each decision is a tradeoff between risk and reward.

Many entrepreneurs have a hard time getting a good perspective on many of these issues.