How to protect intellectual property, technical & commercial capital in business offers

If you are a freelancer, run a business, or hold a commercial role, you know how crucial the formulation of offers, project presentations, and negotiation of agreements are to securing new clients. These are delicate phases that require precision and foresight: your company must be able to translate its know-how and project vision into a clear, competitive, and personalized offer. The formulation of a quotation often results from days, if not weeks, of technical work, design, strategic analysis, and the combination of multidisciplinary skills. It is a process that can involve various professionals and entails the creation of complex and valuable documents.

Imagine sharing the result of such effort with your prospect without particular precautions and in full trust, only for them to share it with a competitor to get a lower price, exploiting the work your company has already done. This is not just a hypothetical scenario but a common reality in many sectors. All companies, from SMEs to large enterprises—especially those operating in highly technical and competitive sectors such as marketing, telecommunications, engineering, and healthcare—face the risk that their technical and commercial know-how may go unnoticed or, worse, be exploited by competitors who have not invested the same time and resources.

Protecting intellectual and commercial property even during the sharing of quotations and offers is therefore not just a legal requirement but a fundamental element to maintain competitiveness and ensure that the value of your work and that of your collaborators is not compromised.

In this article, we want to delve into the topic and offer you ideas and solutions, such as our Secure File Manager, to protect unpatented ideas and commercial offers, ensuring that technical and strategic details remain confidential and safe from unauthorized sharing.

What is meant by the technical and commercial capital of offers and quotations, and why is it important to protect it?

Commercial offers are never just simple quotation documents; they contain intrinsic value that can be divided into two main categories: technical capital and commercial capital. Both represent fundamental elements of your business proposal and require adequate protection to prevent them from being exploited by external parties or competitors.

Technical capital represents all the specialized and detailed information that arises from the experience and skills of your company’s professionals. This data goes far beyond simple economics: we are talking about projects, studies, and analyses that reflect years of technical know-how and in-depth knowledge. For example, in the engineering sector, technical capital might include complex structural projects with detailed drawings, resistance calculations, and operational planning. In telecommunications, it could involve advanced network schemes or security solutions to protect corporate data. In the healthcare sector, technical capital might refer to studies and technical specifications for the installation of advanced medical equipment or clinical information management systems. In any case, it is a set of specific, specialized, and personalized information, a true form of intellectual property that must be protected with due care.

Parallelly, offers also contain another equally crucial type of value: commercial capital. This aspect concerns the strategic information that the company has developed to present its proposal in the market: pricing strategy, sales conditions, contractual terms, and discount policies. These details are fundamental to differentiate your offer and win a client. However, if a client shares the quotation with a competitor, the latter could use it to formulate a more advantageous proposal, reducing your profit margin and competitive potential. Safeguarding commercial capital means ensuring that the economic and contractual information contained in your quotation remains confidential and is not exploited by third parties, thus maintaining control over your negotiations and protecting the real value of the offer.

Protect Your Quotations with Boolebox

Boolebox offers a cutting-edge platform, the Secure File Manager, designed to protect all corporate documents—including commercial offers—and ensure that sensitive information remains confidential. Thanks to its advanced features, Secure File Manager allows you to limit document access, prevent unauthorized sharing, and protect against unauthorized screenshots or prints.

In detail, by adopting a tool like Secure File Manager to manage the sending of your commercial offers, you can leverage features such as:

• Sharing Block: The platform prevents files from being sent to third parties without authorization, maintaining control over who accesses your offers.
• Download and Print Block: Secure File Manager reduces the risk of offers being copied, saved, or printed, protecting information from being reproduced or distributed without permission.
• Screen Capture Block: This feature prevents the possibility of someone taking screenshots of the content and then sharing the images with third parties.
• Expiration Setting: Shared files can be accessible only for a limited period, ensuring that offers are not usable beyond the established date.
• Access Traceability: Boolebox provides monitoring tools to know who has accessed the documents and what actions have been taken.

Secure File Manager, like all Boolebox solutions for protecting corporate data, is designed to be easily implementable in various industries and sectors without compromising your company’s operations and processes. Don’t let the fruit of your labor be exploited by your competitors. Contact us for more information, request a demo, or implement tailored solutions for your company!