How to Coordinate the Networked Enterprise in a Context of Open Innovation? A New Function for Intellectual Property Rights

The networked enterprise simultaneously seeks to develop new knowledge in order to compete on international markets thanks to its innovation capacity and to improve its allocation of resources, notably by reducing its production and organisational costs. In this paper, we study the functions of intellectual property rights in these productive and organisational objectives of the networked enterprise. We consider that they have an important ‘coordination function’, making easier the relationships between the fragmented parts of the networked enterprise. This coordination role is gaining ground in the context of open innovation. It is, thus, associated to the more traditional ‘incentive/defensive’ function of IPRs, which aims at giving incentives to the constitution of the firm’s ‘knowledge capital’. This coordination function is also associated to the ‘offensive’ one, relying on the construction and the reinforcement of entry barriers which contribute to position the firm within the innovation network to which it usually belongs. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2012