Intellectual property protection as the non-financial asset of a family business in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Long-term experience, surveys, and statistics show that family businesses mostly lack strategies of protecting their intellectual property. Tradition, experience, family recipes, the name, and the brand of a family business are the basic prerequisite for its sustainability in future generations. The objective of this paper is to evaluate whether the existence of patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property is dependent on the length of time family businesses have been active on the market. The paper also addresses the question of whether there is a relationship between the existence of different forms of intellectual property and the amount of government support drawn down. The uniqueness of this paper lies in the compilation and statistical evaluation of a unique intellectual property database of 740 registered family businesses in the Czech Republic and is the first academic paper on this topic in the country.