The paradox of openness: Appropriability, external search and collaboration

To innovate, firms often need to draw from, and collaborate with, a large number of actors from outside their organization. At the same time, firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas. This gives rise to a paradox of openness—the creation of innovations often requires openness, but the commercialization of innovations requires protection. Based on econometric analysis of data from a UK innovation survey, we find a concave relationship between firms’ breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation, and the strength of the firms’ appropriability strategies. We show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for…

• CB
  Copenhagen Business School
• IC
  Imperial College London
• NE
  National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts
• DF
  Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
• DF
  Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond
• EA
  Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

  Award: GR/R95371/01
• EA
  Economic and Social Research Council

  Awards: RES/G028591/1, ES/G042993/1