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Laursen & Salter (2014) "The paradox of openness: Appropriability, external search and collaboration

25 important questions on Laursen & Salter (2014) "The paradox of openness: Appropriability, external search and collaboration

What is the paradox of openness?

The creation of innovation requires openness, but the commercialization of innovations requires protection

What does this paper explore?

How the choices of firms to be open to different external actors are related to the choices they make about their appropriability strategy

What is an appropriability strategy?

The approach to protecting the knowledge against being copied and appropriating the returns from their innovative activities.

Which two aspect of firm openness are explored?

The breadth of the firm's innovation search efforts
The range of types of partner organizations in formal collaborations for innovation

In which way is focused on the breadth of firms' external search strategies?

By looking at the number of separate search channels (sources of innovation), such as suppliers, users, competitors, research organizations and universities, that firms use in their search for innovative opportunities

Where is the breadth of collaboration with examined?

Suppliers
Customers
Competitors
Research organizations
Universities

What does formal innovation enable?

More sustained exchanges between the focal firm and its external environment

What does formal innovation require?

Greater managerial effort to find suitable partners, agree on contracts and coordinate joint efforts

What is a major problem associated with accessing external sources of knowledge?

In order to obtain knowledge, organizations have to reveal some parts of their own knowledge to external actors.

How do managers make their firm open?

By engaging with a broad set of external actors in their innovation activities, but then they also have to protect their own firm's knowledge from being copied by competitors

What do the authors suggest about the firm-level strength of overall appropriability strategy?

It shows a concave relation to the openness of external search and collaboration for innovation

Which two related forms of openness are there (building on the emerging literature)?

External search
Innovation collaboration

Where can cooperation provide firms access to?

Complementary resources that enable the successful development of new products and processes. And it may also enable them to be more adept at commercializing these ideas.

Why is collaboration a "hard" form of openness?

Since formal collaboration requires a firm and its external partners to adhere to an agreed structure for the exchange

On which appropriability strategies do they focus in this article?

A broad range of protection mechanisms including

Patents
Registration of designs
Secrecy
Lead times
Product complexity
Trademarks

Why is application of protection mechanisms important for firms?

To ensure their technology is not copied by others and to inform negotiations over collaboration with a range of external parties

What is the paradox of disclosure?

Trading ideas, the willingness-to-pay of potential buyers depends on their knowledge of the idea, yet the knowledge of the idea implies that potential buyers need not pay in order to exploit it.

What is usually necessary to win the support of external parties or gain access to external knowledge sources?

Share knowledge with other actors in the innovation system

What are the negative consequences for the possibilities for external collaboration?

While some emphasis on appropriability sends a positive signal to potential collaborators, too strong a focus could be interpreted as signaling that collaboration with the focal firm will be difficult, and that conflicts over control and ownership of knowledge might ensue. Application of overly restrictive protection mechanisms might reduce the interest of firm managers in collaboration, and scare off external actors in the innovation system.

What is the strong suggestion that the implications of high levels of appropriability play out differently for hard and soft forms of openness?

Firms that invoke strong protection mechanisms to help capture value from their innovative efforts are likely to find it more difficult to find patterns to collaborate with, but less likely to find that it hampers external search.

In which ways can firms learn from their competitors?

Directly or indirectly

What does indirect learning include?

Reverse engineering of competing products or mirroring the innovative efforts of competitors in own product development efforts

In which way do many firms make active efforts to track and monitor their competitor's activities?

By scrutinizing product announcements, patent applications and university collaboration partners

When are the risks of learning much greater?

In the context of external search or innovative collaboration with competitors than in relation to interactions with any other actor in the firm's portfolio of external search channels or innovation collaborations

What do the authors suggest about working with competitors?

Working with competitors requires the firm to pay extra attention to appropriability to avoid unwanted spillovers of knowledge.

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