Protecting Intellectual Property and Appropriating Value from Innovations in Weak Appropriability Regimes
Maurice Holland Award Keynote
Thursday, June 9, 8:45am – 9:45am CT
How can multinational corporations (MNCs) protect their intellectual property (IP) when patents are weakly enforced? We focus on an innovator’s direct competitive response to local imitators, rather than an indirect response through the country’s legal system. An imitator will only take action to appropriate the innovator’s value if the imitator has the financial motivation, opportunity, and ability to copy and commercialize the innovator’s product/service. If the innovator can decrease one of these conditions to a level that demotivates or inhibits the imitator from taking action, the innovator will have protected its IP. In this article, we introduce the constructs barrier to imitation and barrier to commercialization, two separate hurdles that can block imitators appropriation of MNC rents. We prescribe MNC IP strategies contingent on country characteristics, local imitator capabilities, the MNC’s barriers to imitation and commercialization, and the value chain activities the MNC desires to locate in the country of interest.
Speaker
James Nebus is Department Chair and an Associate Professor in the Strategy and International Business Dept. in the Sawyer Business School of Suffolk University in Boston. He has 22 years of industry experience including 10 years in international management positions in Europe and Asia. He received a Ph.D. in international business and MBA from the University of South Carolina, as well as BS in Electronic Engineering and BA in Economics from Rutgers University. He has published in the Journal of International Business Studies, Academy of Management Review, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and Journal of International Management among others.