Sincerity is a dangerous thing: On how appropriability regimes shape innovation strategies

1 Introduction

Many scholars have studied the effects of the environment on innovation strategies. In the management area, various studies have shown the importance of hostility – defined as the threat to the firm posed by competitive intensity and the speed of technological change– in the shaping of management practices [6, 25]. As noted in Teece’s [30] seminal contribution, in the case of innovative firms, one of the main sources of “hostility” is the threat stemming from potential imitators. This threat may be explained, at least partially, by environmental characteristics such as the legal and technological difficulties faced by imitators, summarized under the concept of “appropriability regime”. An interesting conclusion of this work is that the weakness or strength of appropriability regimes affect the structure of the company, since it conditions its decisions on integrating or outsourcing the different types of activities leading to the creation and profitable use of new products or processes. Teece’s contribution merged two previously disconnected research lines: innovation and strategic management [27]. In this sense, the appropriation concerns of innovative firms take the shape of special management challenges that absorb time and resources from the firm.

Initially, research on the mechanisms through which firms face appropriation concerns was almost exclusively reduced to intellectual property rights (IPR), including patents, copyrights, trademarks and utility models [11]. However, recent studies have expanded the spectrum of analysis to include other legal mechanisms such as contracts and changes in labour legislation, as well as strategic mechanisms such as secrecy, lead-time, complexity and other complementary resources and capabilities such as manufacturing capacity, control of distribution networks, and relationships with customers and suppliers, among others [5, 24].

Recently, the intersection between innovation studies and strategic management has led to the emergence of an increasingly popular research agenda: open innovation studies. The literature on open innovation has shown a direct relation between open innovation strategy and firm performance, as a consequence of the effect stemming from access to external resources. This research stream, however, has been characterised by the adoption of a generalist, context-free view on the openness-performance relationship that may be unrealistic given the presence of management costs associated with openness [22]. However, the empirical evidence substantiating this view might be affected by certain methodological choices, since a large part of the work in this area does not explicitly contemplate the possibility of a cost-benefit relation in open innovation strategies [13].

The resurgence of a line of research initiated by Laursen and Salter [19] – but with little attention until recently [2, 28]– allowed the inclusion of this cost-benefit analysis, acknowledging that appropriation concerns play a very relevant role. In particular, in this paper we are interested in the costs raised by appropriation concerns, since “the creation of innovations often requires openness, but the commercialization of innovations requires protection” [20, p. 867].

Meanwhile, the digital transformation has created new challenges. In particular, the emergence of digital platforms and ecosystems has led to new business models aimed at capturing the value of innovations [31]. This is also the case with intelligent systems, which despite being “intelligent” still require at least the ability to sense the environment, make decisions and control action [1].

In this paper, we analyse how appropriability regimes are helpful to predict specific patterns of knowledge management strategies in innovative firms, proposing an analytical framework where differences in strategies followed by firms are explained by differences in the environments they face, characterized by disparate levels of threats posed by potential imitators. We show that such strategies in weak appropriability regimes, in contrast with stronger ones, are characterized by more complexity (regarding the use of multiple protection mechanisms), and also by decreasing returns from the use of an open innovation strategy.

Our results have practical implications for R&D managers and policy-makers, since they provide a method to visualize the variety of context-dependent mechanisms used by firms to profit from their innovations.

2 Knowledge management strategy and the appropriability problem

Schumpeter [29] and Arrow [4] introduced the “appropriability problem” in the theoretical discussion of innovation, explaining that a certain degree of monopoly might be desirable to foster innovation. This theoretical problem has been typically used to justify the introduction of IP rights to guarantee the appropriation of benefits from innovations. However, as Teece [30] showed, the legal protection of IP is not a perfect strategy in certain contexts, and the appropriation strategy of innovators might be quite complex, involving managerial decisions conditioned by the environment. In particular, innovators’ strategies will be shaped by what he called the “appropriability regime”. This regime refers to environmental factors, different from firm and market structure, that govern an innovator’s ability to capture the profits generated by an innovation. According to Teece, the most important dimensions of this regime are the complexity of the innovation and the efficacy of legal mechanisms of protection. These two dimensions are used to conceptualize the thread posed by potential imitators.

Elaborating on the argument of Teece, there are at least two types of activities needed to profit from innovations:

inventive activities, to produce (or acquire) the “core knowledge” embedded in a potential innovation

It is obvious that not all firms engage in inventive activities. And as stated by Teece a successful innovation cannot be assured if firms focus solely on inventive activities, given the need for managing appropriation activities.

According to recent studies [5, 24], the different mechanisms to manage appropriation problems can be classified in two groups:

legal mechanisms, such as patents, utility models, copyright, trademarks, contracts and changes in labour legislation

There are very good reasons to expect that innovation strategies might be context-dependent, since the threats and opportunities for innovative firms are not the same everywhere. Castellacci [8] proposed a sectoral taxonomy based on differences in appropriability regimes. Although he attempts to discuss the variety of patterns at the aggregate level, it is easy to see that these differences might have profound implications for management practices at the firm-level. For example, relying on legal protection of IP might be a good strategy for certain types of codified knowledge. However, this kind of strategy is far from perfect in other contexts. Take, for instance, the case of tacit knowledge flowing with the mobility of workers. In this case the management of human capital in the company might be essential to guarantee the appropriation of profits from R&D [7, 17]. The creation of networks also affects the ability of firms to appropriate the profits of innovation. As Henttonen et al. [14] observe, collaboration with other partners for R&D activities might generate risks of spreading knowledge and misappropriation of the value generated. This risk can be managed using different strategies, alongside the legal mechanisms of IP protection, such as contracts, lead-time, etc. [26].

In this paper we suggest that the study of knowledge management activities cannot be approached from a context-free perspective, since these types of activities have an organic relation with the specific context faced by the firm. In this sense, we propose that not all knowledge management activities are equally desirable in all contexts, given the fact that some of them will have little effect on the general strategy of the innovative firm under certain conditions. Thus, we address the following research questions: does the appropriability regime faced by the firm influence the impact of management strategy on innovation activities? And, if this is the case, is it possible to find clear patterns for knowledge management responses from companies, which can be explained by differences in appropriability regimes?

3 Research method and data

3.1 The model

Most analyses relating knowledge management with innovation processes use “output variables” such as innovation performance or sales. In this paper, we have chosen a different strategy studying the role of such practices on the innovation process through its impact on R&D investment.

There are at least two good reasons for this choice. Firstly, the advantage of using input variables is that they differ from output variables in the sense that they reflect an active attitude towards the attainment of innovations, and are not directly mixed with demand conditions for innovation, as is the case of variables such as innovation performance [3]. In this sense, most analyses involving performance measures might be using incorrectly specified models, since the explanation of innovation performance might require, besides the input variables, other measures representing demand conditions that are usually omitted in such models.

Secondly, based on Teece [30], recent studies have highlighted the relevance of complementary knowledge and capabilities affecting the profitability of R&D investment, but the study of knowledge management as a complementary intangible asset in innovation processes has been overlooked in empirical analyses. Indeed, some management practices are expected to have an intimate (maybe trivial) relation with the profitability of R&D investment since they are directly connected with the development of the core knowledge embedded in potential innovations (e.g., R&D outsourcing, collaboration for R&D projects, acquisition of external knowledge such as patents, licenses or other technical knowledge, etc.). But there are other management practices that are not related with this core knowledge, and therefore their role in innovation processes (if any) is not straightforward and might show how R&D profitability depends on other types of knowledge and capabilities, such as manufacturing capacities, managerial capabilities, marketing activities, and so on.

As stated before, from an innovation perspective we might split the firm’s activities into two different groups: inventive and appropriation activities, that is to say, activities that produce the core-knowledge embedded in innovations and activities that appropriate the benefits of such innovations, respectively. From an empirical point of view, when analyzing knowledge management as a determinant of private R&D investment, we must be aware of the distinction between these two kinds of activities. On the one hand, the relation of inventive activities with R&D profitability might be somehow trivial: inventive activities are expected to be complementary or substitutes to R&D activities, because R&D is one of them. On the other hand, appropriation activities might be related (but not necessarily) with R&D profitability because they might be a part of the firm’s strategy to profit from R&D activities though the commercialization of R&D results.

The basic modelling approach to R&D investment from a micro-level perspective is well developed [10, 15]. The starting point is the assumption that the firm sorts the existing R&D projects hierarchically according to their expected returns, in order to start investing in those considered more profitable. The marginal profit of R&D activities can then be represented as a function involving marginal returns (MR) and marginal costs (MC), as presented in the following system F i = MR i ( R i , I i , X i , Z i ) - MC i ( R i , I i , X i , Z i ) ,(1) where R _i is a scalar measure of internal R&D intensity for i-th firm– as it is usual in conventional analysis, each project is implicitly taken as being finely divisible for expositional convenience. The vector I _i contains measures for inventive activities (different from internal R&D); vector X _i captures appropriation activities, such as IP protection, production/manufacturing capacity, marketing activities, up-to-date commercial practices, and collaboration agreements with costumers; Z _i are other factors possibly related with the profitability of R&D activities.

A competitive equilibrium requires that F _i  = 0, for all i. Regarding R _i , the “shift factors”, I _i , X _i , and Z _i , are assumed to displace the marginal profit function. Figure 1 illustrates this case, assuming that F : ℝ 2 → ℝ . A shift in the use of input X from X’ to X” generates new incentives to invest in R&D. The result is an increase of R&D activities of R”-R’.

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Fig. 1

Shifts in R&D intensity.

Assuming that the output of R&D activities is a function with strictly decreasing returns to scale for each input, and the profit maximizing behavior, then we can interpret the relation between R&D activities and other inputs as a function^rmbox1: R i = R i ( I i , X i , Z i ) , for i = 1 , … , n(2)

The dependent variable in equation (2) is explained by other variables divided in two groups: inventive activities ( I _i ) and appropriation activities ( X _i ). Given the fact that our dependent variable is also an “inventive activity”, its relation with other activities of this type is somehow straightforward, showing the scale of the invention plan, its openness to other sources of knowledge, and the substitutability between internal R&D and external sources of knowledge. On the other hand, the explanation provided by appropriation activities captures the non-trivial relation of the activities to appropriate profits from R&D efforts. Finally, among the remaining shift factors ( Z _i ), we will pay attention to the degree of openness to other sources of knowledge – as studied in Laursen and Salter [19], Chen et al. [9], Garriga et al. [12], Salter et al. [28], Ardito and Petruzzelli [2], Huang et al. [18]– in order to verify the profitability of the open innovation strategy.

With this model, the empirical strategy to answer our research questions is to test the relation of knowledge management strategies with R&D profitability under different appropriability regimes, following the sectoral taxonomy proposed in Castellacci [8]. In order to simplify the exposition of the results, we shall focus on two sectors of activity: Software and Hardware. The former is classified as a knowledge intensive business service having a weak appropriability regime, as opposed to the latter one which is part of the science-based manufacturing sector with a stronger appropriability regime. In this sense, our analysis can be seen as a comparative case study, where empirical evidence is intended to show the plausibility of the relation between the environment of the firm and the knowledge management strategy. The justification for the choice of these two sectors is that they appear to be based on very different strategies regarding IP protection; therefore we expect to find not only that patenting is a profitable strategy in hardware, but also to prove that the strategy in Software activities is typically more complex, making use of other practices besides legal protection of IP. Additionally, given these differences in appropriability regimes in these sectors, we will show that the threat from imitators in weaker regimes negatively impacts the profitability of open innovation strategies.

In this section we summarize the results obtained in this research. The evidence confirms that appropriability regimes explain the differences in knowledge management strategies. Firms in the software sector typically make use of a more complex strategy that goes beyond IP protection. On the other hand, the profitability of open innovation strategy exhibits a U-inverted shape, and the effect of decreasing returns is higher in the software sector, consistently with the hypothesis of higher threats in weaker appropriability regimes.

In Table 2 we present descriptive statistics of the variables used in the econometric analysis. Summarizing, the hardware sector exhibits a higher R&D intensity, uses a more open strategy, relies more on legal protection of IP, shows a higher propensity to engage in marketing activities and R&D outsourcing, and participates more in international markets.

The results of econometric analysis are presented in Table 3. The first important result is the positive coefficient related to the variable openness depth, and the negative value of the coefficient related to the squared value of this same variable, consistent with a curvilineal (U-inverted) relation between the strategies of open innovation and the profitability of R&D.

In Fig. 2 we isolate the relation between openness depth and R&D profitability, taking the coefficients of the model and assuming that the optimum degree of openness is equal in both sectors.

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Fig. 2

Openness depth and R&D profitability.

As shown, the profitability of an open innovation strategy, measured by the openness depth, falls faster in the software sector. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that the threats of sharing knowledge with other agents are bigger in weaker appropriability regimes.

Regarding the complexity of knowledge management strategies, results show that firms from the software sector rely to a larger extent on practices that go beyond the legal protection of IP. In Fig. 3 we compare the coefficients of appropriation activities (weighted by 1 minus the p-values, as a measure of the probability of the coefficient being equal to zero).

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Fig. 3

Differences in appropriation mechanisms.

Firms from the hardware sector clearly rely on legal protection of IP, over other appropriation practices. Additionally, those firms profiting more from their R&D activities in this sector are characterized by low productive performance, consistently with Teece’s idea on the lower necessity of developing manufacturing capacities in stronger appropriability regimes. On the other hand, although companies in the software sector also rely on the legal protection of IP, it is very clear that the companies that make the most profitable investment in R&D in this sector use more complex marketing strategies.

Management practices across firms are highly conditioned by the environment they face. This is particularly true in the case of innovative companies, which face different levels of threat from potential imitators. Since the pioneering work of Teece [30], the concept of appropriability regime has been useful in describing specific sectoral patterns in the appearance of such threats. However, there have been few efforts to formally prove the impact of different regimes on firms’ knowledge management strategies.

In this article, we demonstrate the profound effect that appropriability regimes can have on the strategies of innovative companies. Our results show that, although there are benefits associated with open innovation strategies, the costs of appropriation tend to grow rapidly in sectors with relatively weak appropriability regimes. As our empirical evidence suggests, this is due to the fact that companies immersed in such regimes must resort to more complex (and costly) practices that go far beyond the legal protection of IP, requiring the firm to integrate many other management practices related to productive capacity and commercialization.

These results have direct implications for the managers of R&D activities in firms, since they highlight many of the costs and efforts that their companies could face in order to profit from their innovative activities. This conclusion is not trivial, given the fact that such costs and efforts might be associated with activities that are relatively independent from the knowledge and capacities needed to develop a new product or process.

On the other hand, our results are also useful to inform innovation policy, since they could help to move the focus of attention from inventive activities (which are traditionally the focus of innovation policies) to appropriation activities. In this sense, many of the policies designed to promote more efficient production and commercialization practices could be framed within a holistic vision of innovation policy.