Introduction

In the present climate of increasing globalisation, biotech companies must seek to acquire strong protection for their products and technologies in all the areas of the world where they wish to operate. It has been projected that the sales worldwide from new biotechnology alone could exceed £60 billion per annum by early this century. This will be derived from a wide range of biotechnology-based products and processes, which have evolved in most cases from many years of expensive research and development. How can such biotechnology products and processes, often referred to as intellectual property (IP), be protected and the due financial profits returned to the rightful inventors and industrial developers? Inventors in the area of biotechnology can be protected by way of different titles of protection including patents for invention, plant breeders' rights and trade secrets.

Intellectual property rights are designed to allow new technologies to be available, so that the originating scientist or company receives a reward for the initiative demonstrated. Intellectual property assets can be any codified knowledge, innovation or anything of actual or potential economic value that has arisen from basic research, analysis and manipulation of biological systems, biological property, industrial application or commercial use.

It is important to differentiate between invention and innovation. Because an invention may not always involve the commercialisation of a new idea, it follows that not all inventions result in innovation.