Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are crucial for innovation. It is the foundation of any knowledge-based economy. It is the interface of - creations and rights. It pervades through all sectors of the economy and is increasingly becoming important for ensuring competitiveness of the enterprise. It is the original creation of human mind that has economic value and is protected by law. The extent to which countries protect their Intellectual property (IP) will determine how well they perform in the new economic environment.

Role of IPR lay in providing a legal right to the inventor to protect his/her creation as well as preventing others from illegally exploiting the creation and thus avoid re-invention of the wheel.

"Your ideas are your property and you have every right to benefit from it" - is the core ethos around which intellectual property rights have been formulated. These are the rights given to a person over the creation of his own mind. The chief purpose is to encourage inventiveness and research that leads to new ideas and the development of new technologies.

The various tools of IPR that are used to protect innovations are :

• Copyright: is concerned with protection of creative works that are musical, literary, artistic, lectures, plays, art reproductions, models, photographs, computer software, etc.
• Patent: pertains to pragmatic innovations and aims to protect inventions that are novel, non-obvious and useful.
• Trademark: is related to commercial symbols and concern to protect distinctive marks such as words/signs including personal names, letters, numerals, figurative elements (logos); devices; visually perceptible two or three dimensional signs/shapes or their combinations; audible signs (sound marks) e.g. the cry of an animal or laughing sound of a baby; olfactory marks (smell marks), use of certain fragrance.
• Industrial Designs: protects novel nonfunctional features of shape, configuration, pattern, ornamentation or composition of lines or colours, applied to any article either two or three dimensional or in both forms by any industrial process or means whether manual, mechanical or chemical, separate or combined which in the finished article appeal to and are judged solely by the eye.
• Geographical Indications (GI): are defined as that aspect of industrial property, which refers to the country or to a place of origin of that product. Typically, such a name conveys an assurance of quality and distinctiveness of the product, which is essentially attributable to the fact of its origin in that defined geographical locality, region or country.

IPR has to be renewed from time to time to ensure the protection of the rights from any infringement.

Intellectual Property Rights are always territorial. Globalization and rapid proliferation of technology has elevated the importance of intellectual property rights. The intangible nature of intellectual property and the world wide consistency of standard practices create a challenging environment for businesses wishing to protect their innovations, brands and design etc.