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Know-how is that collection of notions that integrate,
improve, clarify and make applicable the techniques normally known
in that particular field. Know-how identifies the conditions wherein
a method, a system or a product is best actuated, it completes all
the detailed information that is necessary to design, construct, sell
and use a product or a plant. In the final analysis, it identifies
everything that finalizes what already exists, improving it and facilitating
the application and/or use and/or marketing thereof.
Generally speaking khow-how is divided into four main categories:
- technological, meaning the development and embodiment of products
and relative machines, systems and methods to obtain them.
- commercial, meaning the collection of information that a company
possesses concerning the products, their modification or perfection,
adaptations required by clients or types of clients, uses to which
they are destined and their performance.
This category includes the collection of commercial strategies that
a company creates to gain credit and to acquire new clients and/or
new markets.
This type of know-how derives from marketing activities, assistance
to clients, the careful cataloguing of results obtained according
to the type of client, the environment where the product is used
and all the other factors that can influence the product and the
users or purchasers thereof;
- financial, meaning the collection of information used to support
the management activity and the commercial activity and which comprises
all the methods able to make the management of the company and the
purchase of the product by third parties financially more advantageous;
- strategic, meaning the collection of information that characterizes
particularly the competitive behavior of the company with respect
to competitor companies.
As soon as the know-how is spread, it is popularized and loses
value as an economic property of the company which originally held
it; it therefore becomes a collection of common knowledge and as
such has no monopolistic economic value.
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