Does IP Strategy Have to Cripple Open Innovation?
By Oliver Alexy, Paola Criscuolo and Ammon Salter
September 25, 2009
How your IP strategy might be killing your open innovation activities — and what you can do to make it an enabler, even a builder of industrial ‘ecosystems,’ instead.
The protection of intellectual property, or IP, would seem to be at odds with the pursuit of open innovation, or OI — companies’ use of “external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as [they] look to advance their technology.”
1 The selective use of research carried out elsewhere can bring new ideas and capabilities to a company, render it more productive and profitable, prevent the company from having to reinvent the wheel and save it a good deal of money as well. While many companies struggle to align these two approaches, often finding that their IP strategy is a disabler of their OI efforts, this need not be the case. Companies that know how to use IP strategically
2 actually make it an enabler of their OI activities and an enhancer of those efforts’ returns.
The Leading Question
How can companies make IP an enabler rather than a disabler of open innovation?
Findings
- Companies need to balance the use of open and proprietary innovation strategies.
- IP can generate licensing revenue while also fostering collaboration.
- Companies must drop the one-size-fits-all approach to IP.
When an IP Policy Can Be Toxic
If your IP department is calling the shots about when and...
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