When you hear The Mickey Mouse Protection act, you are probably thinking about how to keep the mouse’s tail out from under the heavy boots of the Florida State Governor. But the Law that is informally called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1995 extended copyright protection for an additional 20 years, giving Disney until November 2024 before the first copyrights on Mickey Mouse begin to roll off copyright protection. This means that by Christmas…
This is a great summary of innovation by country from Visual Capitalist. See the Global Innovation Index (GII) map here:https://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-innovative-countries-2022/ We, at Strategic Business Planning Company, www.SBP.com, are always interesting in all aspects of innovation. Sometimes we hear from a layperson or an executive that the most innovative country in the work is … Israel and Ireland were mentioned in recent years. One executive said that “all innovation comes from Israel”. All right, admittedly,…
The most widely identified Trade Secret is, of course, Coke Cola. (The original formula included caffeine and cocaine – thus the name – but that is a different discussion!) In 1903, cocaine was removed, leaving caffeine as the sole stimulant ingredient, and all medicinal claims were dropped. But the Coke-a-Cola trade secret lives on. Sections below: Most Widely Acknowledged Trade Secrets. Our Trade Secrets Assessment Tool. Trade secrets definition and law (UTSA). Most Widely Acknowledged Trade…
IBM is again the leader in patents issued. That’s 28 years and running. IBM had 9,130 patents issued in 2020, compared to the next highest, Samsung with 6,416. There’s about 15 electronic and manufacturing companies with 2,000 to 3,000 patents issued. Note that all the top 10 are electronics and/or chip makers. Forbes has a nice article by Roberts about the top 20 patent recipients of 2020. Apple, the largest company by market cap ($2.1T),…
What’s up with the Stock Market(s)? Feb 8, 2021 the various stock market indexes all hit all time highs. Wow. First off, Trump was very business friendly – some would argue too business friendly (at the expense of the environment and labor. But the market has chugged happily upward based on the likelihood of a Biden win and the certainty of it after the election. Markets don’t like uncertainty, and Trump has been a wildcard…
Every business needs to do planning and reporting. The trick for each organization is to do the right amount of planning. You can’t spend all your time planning, and you can’t completely avoid planning. Ideally you should work the planning process around the reporting and accounting that you have to do anyway: mainly tax reporting that culminates at the end of the tax year. The approach visualized in Figure 1 organizes your year so you…
