Creating Possibilities With Business Contracts

• Published date: 04 April 2023
• Subject Matter: Corporate/Commercial Law, Corporate and Company Law, Contracts and Commercial Law
• Law Firm: Rouse
• Author: Mr Erik Oskarsson and Thomas Randes

Overview

By creating a pioneering process optimised for harvesting indoor light to power electronics indoors, a Swedish company is now a leading developer and manufacturer of printed organic solar cells. The accelerating digital transformation requires new maintenance solutions. These include, among other things, energy harvesting that reduces or eliminates disposable batteries, cuts the cost of battery replacements and reduces the environmental impact. Rouse Consultancy was hired to form a secrecy strategy and to actualize deployment of agreements in order to maintain its advantage against competitors.

The main challenge for the client was how to protect the valuable functionality of, and revolutionary data associated with, the technology from being exposed to prospects in a sales process depending on a free trial offer. The client's agreement strategy is based upon a dynamic approach of moving assets and knowledge between three strategic layers subject to business rationale; undisclosed, collaboration, and open layer. This layer structure helps in decision-making internally providing clarity regarding the level of secrecy to be achieved in relation to the own company and its competitors. The lack of strategy per layer, secrecy undertakings and agreements between the parts created operational implications in controlling how the competitors could reverse engineer the product into components and exploit the processes into designing a similar innovation. This would ultimately destroy the value of the client's company and they would lose their competitive advantage and share of the market to competitors. The challenge for Rouse was to understand and distinguish the sales of material technology and...