Intellectual property: Tension on Open Innovation?

As firms turn their innovation activities towards collaborating with external partners, they face additional challenges in controlling their property. Whilst different modes of intellectual property regimes are applied in closed innovation systems, there seems to be tension between the concepts of “open innovation” and “intellectual property”. Existing literature yields inconclusive results concerning the en- or disabling function of intellectual property in open innovation. Further, as prior research concentrated on relations between intellectual property and open innovation on aggregate levels, we introduce the Open Innovation Life Cycle as a management tool to integrate success factors of intellectual property management over and beyond the collaboration process. Specifically, including considerations of collaboration terminations and deferred obligations early contributes to successful integrations. Additionally, the two main types of time disparity of the Open Innovation Life Cycle and different intellectual property regimes are discovered as the hinge factors in integrating intellectual property and open innovation.