SMALL firms are being warned to protect the identity and ideas at the heart of their business.

New research by the Federation of Small Businesses suggests small firms are struggling to protect their intellectual property and time and money spent on protecting patents, branding and product designs takes valuable resources away from business development, potentially putting growth and innovation at risk.

Judi Brazkiewicz, chairman of FSB Worcestershire, said: “Most micro and small businesses are great at what they do, but many of them simply lack the resources to ensure intellectual property is legally protected. We work in a global market, which means that anything on the internet may be copied or stolen. Certain cloud storage providers may not be the service small businesses need. The cloud is fraught with issues around copyright, so I urge anyone using these facilities to check out the provider’s terms and conditions before storing their precious work. Similarly, if you are sharing work through the cloud or more convention methods, ensure that your work is truly yours. Photos, logos, music and so on, which you haven’t created belongs to its originator, even if you’ve bought it, you will almost certainly need permission to use it for commercial purposes.”

Protecting intellectual property is critical for the UK’s increasingly knowledge-based economy, yet a quarter of the businesses surveyed by the FSB with intellectual property rights suffered some sort of violation or wrongdoing within the last five years. With almost one in three small businesses who own some form of intellectual property rights reliant on it for 75 to 100 per cent of their revenue, infringements of these rights can be very damaging to small businesses.