As pointed out in part 1 of this article, crystallizing your creative business basically involves gathering, mapping out and securing the intellectual property that makes your business unique and valuable. (You may want to read that again).

We do this continuously at Engage Brandcraft – it’s a ongoing work in progress. I think it would need to be in any creative business unless that business has been going for 40 years and the secret recipe hasn’t changed in all that time (as in: not even a new billing system has been added to the mix).

To be sure, there’s no hard and fast way of doing this – the more unique your approach, the more unique your outcomes. I’m only giving you a big picture starting point.

In a nutshell, our cycle consists of three distinct stages but I don’t think that matters either, as long as your end goal is to give structure to the methodologies, approaches and supporting collateral that make your work different and brilliant. Any ideas or input into this would truly be welcome by the way as we intend to continue revisiting this periodically as our business grows and focuses.

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Here are a number of simple actions that will help you take ownership of your creative business ideas before you divulge them. The more proactive you are, the better protected you’ll be.

This article is the response to a recent question prompted by my last article: Crystallizing Your Creative Business (Part 1).

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Crystallizing (ie setting, documenting and protecting) your Intellectual Property is a worthwhile process with a very worthwhile result. It forces us creative types to take a moment and look at what makes our creative businesses unique and valuable (as distinct from ourselves as the creators within the business). Most of us are just getting used to protecting the IP in our OWS – our creations. A big and brilliant step. But what about the IP that’s sitting there in the creating, the creator, your business?

I was recently given the arduous task of gathering, mapping out and securing the intellectual property of our fledging agency, Engage Brandcraft. Yawn? Not so much. In fact, if you run a small creative agency or are building your profile as a freelancer, you may enjoy this.

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