By Wen-Yee Lee
TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan’s TSMC manufactures the world’s most advanced chips. It now wants to teach its suppliers and partners how to better manage their trade secrets to foster innovation.
The company, the world’s largest chip foundry that makes chips for the likes of Nvidia and Apple, plans to market a system it has built to manage and leverage its treasure trove of trade secrets to companies in Europe and the United States, its associate general counsel told Reuters.
Fortune Hsieh, who also chairs the Taiwan Association for Trade Secrets Protection, said the trade secrets registry system which TSMC began building in 2013, has been adopted so far by 20 local firms, including ASE Technology Holding Co.
“If our suppliers also adopt this trade secret registration and management system… it can help them build a stronger innovation culture and more systematic management…and in turn, we benefit from that as well,” Hsieh said in an interview.
The registry system stemmed from an idea that companies should not only look to protect their trade secrets but catalogue them in a way that they can encourage innovation, he said.
The ultimate goal is to retain more technology within the company and reinforce TSMC’s competitive advantage, he said.
TSMC has more than 610,000 cases logged onto its trade secret registration system at the end of July that included technologies and know-how, Hsieh said.
The database integrates with its HR and IT platforms and uses artificial intelligence analytics to monitor projects, track joint development with outside partners and identify standout talent, he added.
Asked whether building such a large database could make TSMC a more attractive target for hackers, Hsieh said: “At the very beginning of establishing the trade secret registration system, cybersecurity was already a fundamental and necessary consideration.”
He said the system is protected by information security processes and automatic encryption of archived files, including the trade secret database, ensuring that even if hackers obtained the data, they would not be able to read its contents.
Despite its efforts to protect its trade secrets, TSMC recently reported a theft case, underscoring challenges companies face in keeping their proprietary technologies protected.
Jeanne Wang, a partner at Tsar & Tsai Law Firm in Taipei, said the system helps R&D-driven companies keep track of their vast confidential know-how and makes it easier to present evidence when a dispute arises.
“Without an inventory, a company would need to expend significant effort to locate information, but with a registration system, retrieval is much faster,” she said, calling such a system rare among global companies.
(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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