ZigZag Digital Associates spends large amounts of time, effort and money researching, designing and building new digital products and services. Many of these investments lead to nothing and the project is often abandoned. This is the nature of our business. In fact this is what drives and continues to drive the founders of the business. The successfully created digital solutions then become Intellectual Properties (IP) owned by ZigZag. ZigZag is essentially a creator, owner and trader in these Digital Intellectual Properties (IP).
ZigZag operating in the digital world and looking to create new digital deliverables has to constantly evaluate different digital methodologies, architectures, frameworks and tool sets. Many attempts to build a new product or approach fail due to the supporting solutions investigated not meeting the criteria that has been set. Considerable effort goes into investigation and evaluation. The very nature of ZigZag means it is highly dependent on solutions not owned by itself or where the standards are not owned or set by ZigZag. This inevitably makes for a very precarious process of research and development. Often the final solutions adopted do not reflect the amount of effort that has gone into putting them together. Like many success stories they look, with hindsight, easily achievable but the final solution was in fact impossible to foresee as you proceeded along an often random development path. To say that serendipity does not play a large part in the successes at ZigZag would be an understatement. The slightly fanciful name of serendipity covers chance, fate, destiny, luck, coincidence, accident and possibly a little bit of actual design. But instinctively we move down the pathways of creativity falling off at each turn to only resurrect ourselves on to new and different pathways. But how does ZigZag market such creations when they are completed?
The digital deliverables produced by ZigZag maybe sometimes be suitable for copyright but they would certainly not these days be patentable. The patent system in the UK or that matter the USA or anywhere is not suited to support what are essentially digital frameworks for producing digital products or services. The costs to define a patent and then to legally support it should anyone use it unauthorised are, unless you are a rich powerful multi-national, prohibitive. So how does ZigZag protect its designs and creations? It is straightforward. It uses secrecy. We operate just like Coca Cola because their drink is a mixture of complex natural substances it is not possible to duplicate it by just analysing the end product. It is the same with the ZigZag Digital Products which are when created usually complex pieces of coded processes and data. So although you can read this code you cannot determine how it was generated. What ZigZag keeps secret, like Coca Cola, is how we made it.
So who do we share these secrets with and under what circumstances? The nature of what we do means those becoming party to the secrets will have to be digital technologists. Without digital experience and understanding you will not be able take on the responsibility of these digital solutions. Although the users of these solutions do not have to be digital experts those operating them at the “core” have to be experts. So within businesses it will be the Information Technology units that will take on the ownership. In the case of individuals or small businesses you need to be information technologically capable.
We share our secrets under three commercial relationships. Firstly you could become an Associate of ZigZag Digital Associates usually because you intend to commercially operate one of our digital deliverables. This becomes a relationship based upon a Franchise Contract. This usually applies to individuals or small businesses. The second relationship is intended for large organisations where you Licence the use of the digital product. This forms a Licencing Agreement. The third relationship is where the digital product is sold to another business for their exclusive use with ZigZag normally retaining a nominal percentage shareholding in the new purchaser’s business entity.
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