WIPO publishes guide to trade secrets in the field of innovation

WIPO publishes guide to trade secrets in the field of innovation

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently released its guide entitled “Trade Secrets and Innovation”. The guide, aimed at a global audience, aims to provide comprehensive and accessible material on the protection of trade secrets, highlighting their importance for economic growth, competitiveness and technological advancement. As such, the document seeks to help government bodies, companies and intellectual property (IP) professionals understand and use trade secrets as an essential part of their innovation and business strategies.

The WIPO guide is based on detailed analysis and offers practical case studies to illustrate how trade secrets can be effectively managed and protected. Structured in seven main parts, the document covers everything from the fundamentals of trade secret protection to the complexities of managing secrets in digital environments. In the first part, the guide presents the importance of trade secrets in the context of innovation and global trade, emphasizing how the protection of these secrets is crucial to promote fair competition and boost technological development. The introduction also highlights the relevance of trade secrets as business assets and provides an overview of the guide’s target readers, including government agencies, innovation support centers, technology transfer offices, IP professionals, business managers and others interested in IP strategies.

The second section explores the high-level objectives of trade secret protection and its role in the innovation ecosystem, discussing how adequate protection can promote competition, improve the efficiency of the innovation system and encourage the creation of commercially valuable information. It also takes stock of national policies and strategies related to the protection of trade secrets and provides examples to illustrate the evolution of the strategic functions of trade secrets in the modern economy. The third part presents the essential building blocks of trade secret systems, providing an overview of the legal frameworks, explaining the differences between trade secrets and patents and explaining how companies can use this information.

The document then delves into the practical management of trade secrets, covering protection against misappropriation and leakage, contamination with third-party secrets and the strategic exploitation of these secrets to maximize their potential. Here, practical examples and illustrative tips are provided to guide companies. Regarding detecting the leakage or misappropriation of trade secrets, the guide provides an overview of the legal options available. In addition to litigation, the guide discusses alternative dispute resolution mechanisms and the challenges associated with maintaining confidentiality during legal proceedings.

The study also highlights the importance of trade secrets in strategic partnerships and collaborative innovation models, discussing the management, handling and protection of secrets in collaborative research projects and the role of academic institutions and public research centers. At this point, it also discusses encouraging collaboration between public research institutions and private companies, with the aim of facilitating the practical application and commercialization of public research results, the cross-fertilization of knowledge and know-how shared by these actors, and trade secrets as products resulting from this collaboration.

Finally, the guide addresses the protection of trade secrets in the form of digital objects, with the rapid advance of digital technologies. To this end, it differentiates between digital data, algorithms or programming code and trade secret information in any technical field, stored in a digital format. The chapter also covers notions of managing digital trade secrets, the challenges of protecting this information in a digital format against cyber-attacks, for example, and the difference between trade secrets and other IP rights in the digital context.

The WIPO guide can be accessed via the link: WIPO Guide to Trade Secrets and Innovation