Publication: Three essays on outbound open innovation and intellectual property protection
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2020-06
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2020-07-22
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Abstract
This thesis consists of three chapters studying topics related to the corporate innovation management. More specifically, the first two chapters discuss the outbound open innovation phenomenon and its relationship with the firm’s behavior in technology and labor markets, respectively. The last chapter links the firm’s litigiousness with its collaborative activities.
The thesis starts with the first chapter (co-authored with Araksya Ayvazyan) studying the firm\s decision to adopt outbound openness in its IP strategy. We propose two channels through which a firm can potentially capitalize on a decision of adopting an outbound open approach in its intellectual property (IP) strategy for no direct financial benefits in return. The first channel involves selling subsequent intellectual assets in markets for technology to meet the demand resulting from the increased engagement of third parties in the liberated knowledge. The second one refers to bringing the subsequent external knowledge in-house via buying intellectual assets or building upon it internally. We capture the variation in IBM’s IP strategy toward more openness, using the decision of IBM to pledge 500 of its patents to the public in 2005. The results from implementing a difference-in-differences approach between 1999 and 2010 provide support for the proposed mechanisms.
The second chapter explores how a firm’s move towards outbound open innovation strategy via opening up the firm’s intellectual property (IP) affects inventor mobility from the firm. Interestingly, the answer is not straightforward because there are arguments to expect both an increase as well as a decrease in inventor mobility as a consequence of the move towards openness. The key argument relies on the degree of complementarity or 11 substitutability between the codified knowledge and the inventors’ tacit knowledge, and how it is altered by outbound openness. Using IBM’s 2005 patent pledge, to capture the firm’s shift towards outbound openness, I empirically investigate its consequences on the likelihood of IBM’s inventors to leave the firm. The findings, on average, favors the proposition that outbound openness decreases the firm’s labor mobility.
In the third chapter (co-authored with Eduardo Melero, David Wehrheim), we study the effect of the strength of the IP enforcement on firm’s collaborative activities. We argue that there are two potential contradicting forces driving the effect, namely, the expected return from learning during a collaborative project, and the expected cost of any unintended potential knowledge leakage during that project. Our results from a quasi-natural experiment, exploiting the reduction of the IP enforcement due to a recent landmark event in the U.S. patent system (the ruling in eBay v. MercExchange), show that weaker property rights, on average, lead to fewer collaborations and alliances. To get additional insights, we also investigate the effect on particular types of collaborations, as well as in settings where the two mechanisms may be strengthened or weakened.
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Mención Internacional en el título de doctor