What is intellectual property and when should I protect it?
Intellectual property refers to the legal rights you can hold over inventions, designs, brands, and creative works. For product designers, the most relevant forms are patents, registered designs, and trade marks.
You should seek legal advice on intellectual property as soon as you have a concept you plan to commercialise. Acting too late can mean you have already disclosed the invention publicly and lost the right to patent it. In product development, public disclosure (at a trade show, in a published paper, or even in a pitch) can destroy patentability in most jurisdictions.
Design Compass addresses intellectual property indirectly through the Uniqueness segment in the inner ring, which prompts you to examine what makes your product genuinely distinctive. That analysis is a useful starting point for identifying what might be worth protecting, though it does not replace specialist legal advice.
