Intellectual Property Rights. Reflections on European SMEs: the Furniture Industry case.

Abstract

The furniture industry is mainly comprised of SME’s and is a perfect example of an industry ripe to adopt extended enterprise practices, sometimes within the same holding and sometimes with external companies. IPR is part of their daily lives but the furniture industry is not used to dealing with IPR matters and in most cases many of the products and/or processes are not duly protected. This paper deals with the Intellectual Property Rights needed and used during the complete product life cycle in furniture manufacturing. It first shows an overview on IPR talking then on the different possibilities of protecting creations and inventions. The furniture product life cycle is described relative to the different possibilities of intellectual and industrial protection. Finally it talks of the possible challenges and threats when moving to extended enterprise practices. The SMART-fm network [7] is working on finding the IPR gaps and reporting them, and will try to establish a methodology to be followed by the furniture industry and by any other SME based industry.