@SAL-e
patents do not protect your research, it protects the by product of your research, the end result as it were, i guess you can try to patent a method for conducting research but that's kind of restricting your research, usually the actual research you undertook to derive your end product can not be protected by a patent, it is very important because if a company wanted to replicate a patented idea without paying royalties, if they can get hold of the research they can reverse engineer a product that could perform similarly without breaching the patent, therefore the research is protected by IP
A very good example of this is material selection, a company can sink significant money into testing the durability and performance characteristics of a material for a given application, another company can bypass all the cost involved and bid significantly lower then the company that undertook the research if they can get a copy of the numbers relating to that research, IP protection is to prevent the original company from being penalized for undertaking the research, the second company would have to pay the original company money or undertake the research themselves
patent != IP