By Josep Maria Pujals

Even though Small Medium Entities (SMEs) represent almost 95% of businesses and contributes significantly to global GDP1 not all type of SMEs own or manage Intellectual Property rights to support their business. It depends on their size, the type of activities that contribute to their competitiveness and also the sector in which they operate.2 Thus small businesses carrying out R&D activities in the life science sector or in other industries that are innovation intensive are more likely to be aware of the strategic role of Intellectual Property. By contrast, small retail companies usually own one or two trademarks and domain names protecting their business and main product or service identity at a national level, as their customer base is only domestic or local. They do not use Intellectual Property to i.e. access new markets or to collaborate with others to develop new products and services because of their lack of sophistication.3