sandra.butterworth's blog

Marketing expert Robert Craven lists as No 1 of his 23 cardinal rules of marketing - "If there's a choice between being better or different then different wins every time!"

Ideally of course you should be different and better. The BIC's Leadership in Innovation workshop on 17 July which is currently free of charge to Staffordshire based businesses will look at the challenges faced by Leaders of companies to bring out that Innovation within their business so that they look to be "different from the crowd".

Friday 26 April is World Intellectual Property Day. This is the day WIPO came into force in 1970 and is a day whose aim is to increase the general understanding of Intellectual Property Rights. As an Innovation Centre we know only too well the importance of IP and run five or six events a year so that local companies can understand and take up any IP protection for their businesses. Yes, Patents can be expensive and take a long time to be granted but can you afford not to protect your innovation? It gives you monopoly on the production of that innovation for twenty years!

Courtesy of the Intellectual Property Office www.ipo.gov.uk here's an interesting story.

On a December night, fifty years ago, a strange and previously unknown creature was introduced to the people of planet Earth. It was a distillation of everything bad: it was super-intelligent; it was armed to the teeth - or the plunger, to use the vernacular humanoid descriptor of the day; it was capable of interstellar travel, telekinesis and time travel; it consisted of an unholy fusion of bad metal and black bile. It was, of course, a Dalek.