Trade secrets are frequently associated with a company’s most valuable and profitable products and services. Maintaining control of critical confidential information is often essential to a growing a company’s revenue stream, enhancing product development, moving into new markets, and continuing to grow and succeed. Along with restricting access to trade secret information to a need-to-know basis – and tracking who is accessing them and how – your company should regularly assess whether competitors may have acquired the recipe for their secret sauce through a theft of your trade secrets.
Monitor Competitor Product Launches and Updates
At a day-to-day level, keep an eye on the products and services your rivals are rolling out and the timing of their launches. If a competing business is able to introduce a complex product similar to yours faster than would seem feasible – or faster than you could do it – it may have learned one or more of your trade secrets and is using them to commercialize their competing products. Pay particular attention to situations where an employee of the competing company had a close relationship or interaction with one of your employees. Pay even closer attention to instances where one of your former employees now works for the competitor. In those cases, it would be highly advisable to closely examine the components of the competitor’s products to figure out what confidential information the competitor could have accessed or received from your company.
Consider Designing a Trap into Your Product
To help establish proof of trade secret theft, software companies sometimes include a line of code in their products that serve no functional purpose yet would appear in a competitor’s product if the source code had been copied from the first company’s products. Similarly, manufacturers sometime add a part that is not necessary to the functioning of a product, but would be included in any products made with stolen machining diagrams.
By continually reviewing the market for copycat items, and planting a “tell” into products, companies can quickly detect trade secret theft, and arm themselves with the data they need to confront unethical rivals, and, if necessary, take them to court.