Protection of IP in Supply Chains Proof of Concept

Manufacturers increasingly rely upon development in the supply chain; e.g., a typical
automotive company has 60% of components manufactured in the supply chain. IP protection
and tracking is essential for securely managing supply chains. A significant level of
resistance, to sharing and enforcement of IP, is damaging supply chain partnerships and the
manufacturing production processes that rely upon them; costs to industry estimated at
€millions (NFF Symposium, 2013). This project, spanning 12 months and costing £166,213,
will build on the success of the Innovate UK funded IPCRESS project in the development of a
proof of concept with basic prototyping of a novel solution for protecting intellectual property
across enterprise boundaries and will support the creation of the Ascema for Supply Chains
solution, based on a patented core technology to protect high value information and IP across
enterprise boundaries. To support trusted sharing and enforcement of rights relating to
information contained within digital content across enterprise and jurisdictional boundaries
there must first be a solution to infringement detection and data tracking that assures the
enterprise that their IP is secure – Ascema offers a potentially disruptive solution. This project
will develop a scalable hybrid and multi-tenanted proof of concept prototype of Ascema for
Supply Chains verifying the technological, practical and economic viability of a novel
Ascema for Supply Chains data loss prevention platform. A planned Stage 2 project will
provide a pre-production prototype of a digital information fingerprinting and tracking
mechanism across enterprise boundaries that will support the take up of this novel platform
within supply chains - a platform that has won GeoLang the title of UK's Most Innovative
Small Cyber Security Company 2015 and the predicted savings to UK PLC are estimated to
be millions of pounds.