This paper examines the most significant intellectual property protection options available to lone entrepreneurs as well as small and medium Entreprises (SME). SMEs are recognised as an important source of innovation yet have limited resources and knowledge to select, secure and enforce their legal rights to their innovations. This paper focuses predominantly on a comparison between patents and registered designs. It will conduct a cost-comparison, and evaluate effectiveness of both measures, before assessing to what extent either of the two measures can be deployed by design-led start-ups. To do so, it will discuss current changes in the UK patent bill, examine past and current start-ups, and sketch out the typical venture development processes. This study relies predominantly on qualitative data collected through open and semi-structured interviews with designer-entrepreneurs. The majority of studies do not differentiate between large corporations, small and medium enterprises (SME), and micro-scale start-ups. Levin et al admit to that when stating that ‘the exclusion of those without publically traded securities undoubtedly means that small start-up ventures, important sources of innovation, were underrepresented.’ (Levin et al, 1987, p. 791) This constitutes a problem, because the fact that the latter have limited access to financial resources and complementary assets such as manufacturing facilities and distribution networks sets them aside from established businesses. This study is aimed at filling the relevant knowledge gap through focusing on early-stage start-ups. Teece argues that IP can be utilized to compensate the lack of complementary assets during the early phase of a business development. But Teece discusses this matter in conjunction with the risk of being imitated (Teece, 1986, p. 297). However, the risk of radical innovations to be imitated during the start-up phase is comparatively small, because the markets are mostly unproven, in some cases non-existent. Compared to established profitable businesses, start-ups, many of which are in the pre-trading stage, face a different set of challenges such as the search for seed funding, prototyping, route to market development etc., and they have different means of tackling these problems such as incubation schemes, peer-to-peer networking, bootstrapping and so on. This study will sketch out development models and strategies, which will provide the independent designer entrepreneur with guidance in their decision-making.