Starting a business can be a complex and time consuming process. Mapping out your offering, researching your customer base, putting together a business plan and gaining finance are usually key priorities, leaving little time for anything else.

Considerations which does need to be high up the agenda at an early stage, though, include your digital strategy and intellectual property registration. The latter in particular isn’t very sexy, but getting it right from the beginning is critical and if you don’t, you could live to seriously regret it.

In today’s knowledge economy, protecting your IP is vital. In software and online gaming, intellectual property isn’t just important to the business – it is the business.

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Globally, its value is massive: according to the OECD, counterfeiting and piracy costs the world economy up to more than £500 billion every year. That’s an astonishingly huge figure which is greater than the GDP of all but 12 countries.

More and more companies are realising the importance of securing their IP, though there’s still work to do. “It’s certainly further up the agenda than it used to be,” says Angus MacLeod, a partner specialising in the subject at the Scottish legal firm Wright, Johnston and Mackenzie (WJM).

“However, it does still have a tendency to be neglected in the rush and excitement of setting up a business.” It is, he adds, particularly relevant to the creative and technology industries. “But it is important to everyone. If you have a brand, you will want to protect it and the goodwill in it.

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"If you are establishing your business identity, you need to make sure that you are not picking something which is too close to a competitor or which is already protected.”

Intellectual property covers design, patents, trade marks and copyright. Most have to be formally registered, though in the UK copyright is automatic.

You may need to think about IP even before you start. If you work for a company and are planning your own entrepreneurial start-up using knowledge or work you’ve done for your existing employer, it’s critical to check that they haven’t protected their rights – if they have, you could be about to breach them. “It’s more difficult to unpick IP issues if you’ve made a success of something, as by that stage it’s going to be more expensive to acquire the rights.”

The same thing applies to the development of your website – you can’t simply take someone else’s copy or design from another site and replicate it – most designers will know this and take it into account.

Angus MacLeod points out that there are other website issues which new entrepreneurs have to consider. “There are rules about the use of cookies and if you are selling online, then you need to have legally sound terms and conditions and also allow people to cancel after they’ve ordered.

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“There are also legal requirements when it comes to disability discrimination, and your site should be accessible to those with a visual impairment.”

While all this may sound challenging and time consuming, he says, it is not something which start-ups should overly fret about.

“A lot of it is managing the risks of being online, and a lot of the things you have to do are just common sense. People shouldn’t get too worried about it.”