AS a former newspaper editor, I have found myself in an unfamiliar position in the past week. While the press speculated about the content of my forthcoming review of intellectual property, I have been required to stay mum rather than seeking to market my story.

This Wednesday, however, the gag will be off and I will present to the government the work I was asked for exactly a year ago — an examination of Britain’s system of intellectual property (IP), how it is coping with the pace of change in the global economy, and what can be done to ensure that it remains fit for purpose.

If the subject matter sounds arcane and unpromising, it is certainly not unimportant. As the knowledge economy displaces manufacturing as the driver of growth in developed economies, intellectual-property rights — copyright, patents, trademarks and design rights — are becoming more important than ever to citizens and companies alike.

IP is all around us. A simple coffee jar may contain a wide variety of different IP rights: its lid and seal protected by patents; the shape of the jar protected by design rights; the label protected by copyright; the brand name protected by trade mark.

And many of our most creative industries — music, film, television — and our biggest investors in research and development, such as the pharmaceutical industry, rely on IP rights to protect their products and ensure that it pays to be creative.

In Britain, the creative industries are growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy. IP — if properly enforced — provides the essential framework to promote and protect creativity and innovation by industry, artists and consumers. Without it few, if any, of the innovations that we take for granted would be brought to the market.

Consider that 20 years ago the market value of the top 10 firms listed on the London Stock Exchange roughly equalled their book value — the value of their physical assets in buildings and machinery. Since then, book value has doubled while market value has increased nearly tenfold.

The difference in value between physical assets and share prices is accounted for by intangible assets such as goodwill, brand value and innovative ideas, many of them protected by IP rights.

So what’s the big problem? Actually there isn’t a fundamental one. After conferring with many of the key users of the system and ploughing through more than 500 detailed submissions from interested parties, my review has concluded that the system is not “broke” and does not need a big fix.

But there is certainly need for reform. Where IP rights fail — because they are inflexible, poorly enforced or fail to keep pace with change — they can stifle innovation at a cost to us all.

Think, for example, about archives and museums unable to save decaying film or sound recordings — like Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia trial speech from 1964 — because to copy them on to a new format would be to breach their copyright protection.

Or the schoolteacher unable to send material electronically to a distance-learning pupil. Or the musician unable to sample other works to create new, groundbreaking recordings. Or the research projects stunted because of uncertainties and complexities in the IP framework.

Today, Britain’s IP system faces two profound changes — globalisation and technological advance. Of course, both of these trends also offer enormous opportunities for businesses reliant on IP.