While some inventions may happen by chance, you are not going to see a cure for cancer or a bionic arm appear merely from an unintentional encounter, dream, or mixture. The lion’s share of medical and technical advancements come into being only after exhaustive, resource-intensive processes. A single new medicine, for instance, on average requires $1 billion in resources and over a decade of research and development before it can be safely administered to patients.

Complex problems oftentimes have complex solutions. The road to curing diseases or advancing medical progress is fraught with many dead ends, long nights, and financial risks. Without the assurance that IP gives for being able to recoup investments in complex R&D that could have global impacts, who’s going to take the risks?

While this type of development is not exclusive to the biotech or biomedical industries, it is certainly indicative of them. We need companies and industries from biotech to entertainment to consumer goods to move the ball forward in innovation. Intellectual property rights do just that- they incentivize the risk takers to make bold moves to advance human progress.

In our talks with innovators from around the world, we have found that there are a lot of people out there with big ideas. They just need a boost to turn those ideas into realities. Whether it is finding a way to make peanut allergies non-life threatening or developing a plant that will reduce our dependency on petroleum, innovators of all shapes and sizes find that intellectual property—in the form of patents, trademarks, and copyrights—serve as the backbone to their innovative potential.

The only boundaries to our innovative potential are time and money. Intellectual property shatters those boundaries by giving the assurance of credit where credit’s due once these world-changing concepts materialize.

The possibilities are infinite: IP delivers cures. IP delivers technology. IP delivers progress. IP delivers culture. IP delivers innovation.