Track 8.1 - Open Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights

Over the last decade, the interest in open innovation and IPRs from academia and practice has been growing continuously. This growing interest is mainly due to Chesbrough’s seminal research with a clear emphasis on the active role of intellectual property management in openness. The fundamental principle of open innovation model is simple in theory. For many organizations, however, the journey toward open innovation is difficult. Particularly open innovation practices rely on a new consideration of property rights. The aim of this track is precisely to focus on the role of IPRs in the open innovation model.

Papers including different theoretical perspectives, different (combinations of) methods, and investigations of different situations and settings should provide further developments in the field as well as identify “blind spots”. The topics of interest include:

- Management of IP assets within various forms of openness:
We welcome research exploring the IP management beyond the « Closed Openess ». By closed openess, we refer to situations where a firm shares IP assets with another firm with or without reciprocal identic transfer. Such dyadic situations are widely explored, but we know little on how firms manage IP assets at large scale in setting. This can be communities or ecosytems contexts where IP management can be considered as an effective support for collaboration. But the focus can also be on more open systems (for example patent pools which really lead to reconsider the management of IP within various actors) or open source settings.

- Forman and informal IP mechanisms of openness:
Beyond formal IP mechanisms like patents, we are looking for research on the management of informal appropriation mechanisms in open innovation. In the line of Chesbrough’s approach, numerous studies have focused on formal IP, especially licensing mechanisms that are at the cornerstone of the three open processes (inbound, outbound and coupled). Complementary emphasis should be put on informal mechanisms (trade secret, know how…) and their role in open systems.

- Multiple perspectives of open innovation:
We look for studies and conceptual works which focus on the micro-foundations, such as skills, knowledge, motivation and other individual prerequisites for openness. This track welcomes more in depth analysis of the deployment of open innovation processes based on the investigation of open practices and especially linked to IP.

- Different methodological approaches:
Besides case studies and quantitative datasets, we look for multi-method approaches, design-oriented works, and in particular methods that make use of new technologies for gathering and analyzing data, such as big data based papers or studies using mobile or virtual ethnographic methods.

- Different settings:
This track reflects recent calls for more studies on open innovation in various organizational contexts: SMEs, at the project level, in multinational setups, ecosystems, pools…. It also includes studies which highlight peculiarities of OI and IP dimension of knowledge sharing in real and virtual social spaces. Indeed, we hope to attract studies from a wide range of geographic spaces (countries, clusters, ecosystem, etc.) as well as real and virtual collaborative spaces (projects, communities, social networks, etc.) or sectors.