Book Reference Terms, Definitions, and Cases

This book is addressed to business and academic executives and senior managers in small and medium-sized businesses or scale-ups that need to understand how to effectively manage the business secrets within their organisation, particularly during new product launches, finance raising, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The book keeps away from technical legal details that are important for legal experts but are not absolutely necessary for managers and executives in their daily lives. It may happen, nevertheless, that some of these terms appear while reading the chapters below, because the authors believed they were necessary to reach some level of understanding the strategic issues concerning business secrets. The authors also believe that non-legal business executives can grasp the essentiality of these terms and then use them to design and implement comprehensive business secrets strategies for all employees. Moreover, having a foundational understanding of the legal concepts at play will also increase their ability to communicate with companies’ legal teams and external advisers. A number of recent confidential information and secret-related legal cases are believed to be representative of the issues that require attention from managers and executives. These are also summarised in this section. These cases come from small to big size companies and involving multiple industries such as chemicals, drugs, biotechnology, information technology, car fleets, car manufacturing, food technology, pharmacy, admin services, and metal industry. This section summarises the elements that are useful to refer to when reading its chapters.