Modularity is a means of partitioning technical knowledge about a product or process. When state-sanctioned intellectual property (IP) rights are ineffective or costly to enforce, modularity can be used to hide information and thus protect IP. We investigate the impact of modularity on IP...

Observable resources, particularly patents, alliances, and team experience, are known to impact a start-up's ability to attract venture capital financing. In this context they potentially fulfill a two-fold function: as productive assets and, likely, as signals of characteristics of a venture...

Open innovation is often facilitated by strong intellectual property rights (IPRs), but it may also function, and even be boosted, when firms deliberately waive some of their IPRs. Extant literature has pointed out the potential benefits of such behavior, but falls short of explaining what...

When trying to attain the benefits of open source software (OSS), proprietary closed source software (PCSS) firms are struggling to adopt this radically different practice of software development. We approach these adoption challenges as a problem of gaining support for organizational...

Digital designs – that is, designs for display on electronic screens – have recently burst onto the intellectual property stage. While in the U.S. a smattering of legal studies have recently addressed the question of digital design as a copyright-, trademark- and patent-eligible subject...

The concept of risk is central to strategy research and practice. Yet, the expected positive association between risk and return, familiar from financial markets, is elusive. Measuring risk as the variance of a series of accounting-based returns, Bowman obtained the puzzling result of a negative...

The existing theory of modularity explains how modular designs create value. We extend this theory to address value appropriation. A product or process design that is modular with respect to intellectual property (IP) allows firms to better capture value in situations where knowledge and value...