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Executives of R&D-based organizations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize and protect the value of their company's assets. Intangible assets drive nearly 70 percent of a biotechnology company's market value, predominantly in the form of scientific intellectual property. Intellectual property (IP) is a collection of intangible assets, such as formulas, patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets and institutional knowledge that gives an R&D company its competitive advantage, differentiation and unique value in the market place. There are documented cases in the life sciences, bio-technology, manufacturing and computer software industries in which a company's loss of intellectual property, either to a competitor or to the public domain, has led to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, legal fees, reduced market valuations and damages related to class-action lawsuits.

Bringing a new healthcare product, drug treatment or fuel additive to market can mean an investment of many years and millions of dollars for bio-pharma or bio-tech organizations. Lab automation technologies and electronic tracking systems are taking the bio-R&D world by storm – streamlining research and driving discoveries and new-product development like never before.

At the same time, they are generating massive amounts of R&D data, records and audit logs – electronic evidence of scientific intellectual property that one day could be called upon to support claims of first-to-invent and ownership. Unfortunately, if just one of these electronic records or data files has been tampered with, or even stolen, the entire investment could be lost.