Hanging onto your Competitive Advantage

Once you've mastered sustaining your competitive advantage, it's time to kick back and enjoy the good life, right? 

Or should you worry (next) about "protecting" the things that went into building your competitive advantage? 

First, this is a "good worry."  A lot of businesses never become successful enough to be concerned about this problem.  But because you excelled in BA-101, you've been successful beyond all expectations. 

So, just when you think there's nothing more to worry about, someone asks whether your competitive advantage is adequately protected. 

Before you answer, they ask another question, "What is it that makes up your competitive advantage?  How could you protect it if you wanted to?"

Thanks again to your outstanding performance in BA-101, you're not only prepared to answer these questions, but you've also got lecture notes and some PowerPoint slides to help:

• Download intellectual_property_week_3.ppt

Throw another log on the fire, open up the PPT slides and enjoy...

If your competitive advantage comes from an efficient manufacturing and production process, protecting your competitive advantage may be a little easier:  make sure your equipment is securely bolted to the warehouse floor. 

Add some insurance to protect against fire, flood and theft and you've done a good job keeping your competitors at bay.

But what if your firm's competitive advantage comes from ideas or ways of doing things that can't be bolted down or locked up at night?  Certainly, they're valuable, but how do you define or describe them so they can be protected.

Maybe you've designed something or have a "special way" of doing things that your customers want and like.  Because you've been successful, you worry about imitators.  You've spent years perfecting how to do things but could someone steal your "style" and get rich off all your hard work? 

You remember from the "salad days" of BA-101 that filing a patent or copyright gets some protections, but how much and for how long?  And how would you "use" these protections?  What are they really worth?

And isn't there another big problem with patents, marks and copyrights?  Don't you have to publicly disclose what's being protected?  What's that cost/benefit tradeoff look like?  Is there some other way to protect my "trade secrets?"