The paradox of openness revisited: Collaborative innovation and patenting by UK innovators

By Ashish Arora, Suma Athreye, Can Huang. 2016

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We revisit the “paradox of openness” in the literature which consists of two conflicting views on the link between patenting and open innovation—the spillover prevention and the organizational openness views. We use the data from the Survey of Innovation and Patent Use and the Community Innovation Survey (CIS6) in the UK to assess the empirical support for the distinct predictions of these theories. We argue that both patenting and external sourcing (openness) are jointly-determined decisions made by firms. Their relationship is contingent upon whether the firms are technically superior to their rivals and lead in the market or not. Leading firms are more vulnerable to unintended knowledge spillovers during collaboration as compared to followers, and consequently, the increase in patenting due to openness is higher for leaders than for followers. We develop a simple framework that allows us to formally derive the empirical implications of this hypothesis and test it by estimating whether the reduced form relationship between patenting and collaboration is stronger for leaders than for followers.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34bda41f8d8fc406626fd7377ffcd3a1377e85ae

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Innovation collaboration and appropriability by knowledge-intensive business services firms (2016, background): “Another possibility is to explore whether KIBS leaders and followers have different behaviour in terms of appropriability mechanisms and collaboration for innovation (see Arora et al., 2016).”
The digital transformation of innovation and entrepreneurship: Progress, challenges and key themes (2019, background): “This also relates to the tension between value creation and value appropriation or the ‘paradox of openness’ (e.g., Arora et al., 2016).”