The two other strategies, aside from patenting, are, first, to rely on trade secrets. That simply means that you try to rely on other legal instruments, such as confidentiality agreements with your suppliers or your partners that prohibit them from releasing certain details about your technology in a public forum. You're simply trying to keep the know-how secret so that you can move forward with a product and launch that product. That really only works when you're dealing with a technology that cannot be easily reverse-engineered, for instance.
The second approach for intellectual property protection is defensive publication. If you're working in a field in which there's a lot of research activity, you know that there might be a lot of groups internationally working in your field. If you make a discovery and you feel that it is prohibitive or not the best business decision to try to patent that, your other option is to go forward and publish that information in the public domain. Once that information is published, if another group were to try to seek a patent on that same concept or a similar invention, that publication would show up when the patent office did a review of the state of the art in the field. One of the criteria for a patent is that it has to be novel and it cannot be obvious to one who is skilled in the art. If you can show that you have come up with a concept and you have published it, it means that another group will not be able to get a patent and block you from using that technology.