How to Protect Intellectual Property While Collaborating in Open Innovation with Firms

1
People should be interested in Intellectual Property (IP) because IP is an intangible business asset, and if IP is not protected then others can basically steal the asset and use it to further their own interests. Protecting IP is what helps to further innovation and ensure that resources are devoted to research and design. It is also about protecting one’s position in the marketplace. As Bican, Guderian and Ringbeck (2017) point out, businesses have to manage their knowledge to maintain a competitive advantage. If that knowledge is only loosely protected, others could take advantage of it as though it were a resource out in the wild waiting to be snatched up by anyone willing to take it.
2
Intellectual Property is best defined as a design, product or creation results from one’s own work and to which one has the rights for reproduction or distribution. IP is typically protected by copyright, patent or trademark, but not always. Algorithms that companies use to trade a market might be considered IP but they may not be protected by patent or copyright. The internal implications of IP are that a company often has to protect its secrets closely; other companies might try to poach workers who have access to IP and lure them away so that they can get a sense of what the other company is doing (Bican et al., 2017). Citadel is currently suing former employees for IP theft for exactly this reason.
3
The major points of the article by Bican et al. (2017) are that businesses have to collaborate with external partners and that means sharing to some degree IP. This results in tension between the open innovation between the firms and IP rights. Bican et al. (2017) discuss how businesses can manage knowledge effectively by maintaining IP rights while simultaneously collaborating in open innovation. The authors first begin by reviewing the relevant literature on the matter; then they turn towards looking at the process of strategic management of IP rights within the open innovation process. The researchers then develop a framework that businesses can be used, which they call the Open Innovation Life Cycle. This framework should help businesses manage knowledge and safeguard IP while collaborating with other firms during an innovative process.
To test out their framework, the researchers apply it to a case study in the pharmaceutical industry. The case study showed that the framework works and that companies should manage their knowledge by preparing for the unique characteristics of the open innovation ahead of time. This preparation should prevent knowledge drain and secure IP. Preparation and prevention are the two keys to preventing IP from being stolen or shared when it is not meant to be shared. Collaboration in innovative processes with external firms should not have to mean that a company exposes everything it knows about a design or concept. Some information should be protected behind a firewall, and that is how IP theft is prevented. The authors show that their study is unique in the field of IP research because it discusses how IP can be protected at the same time that a company engages in open collaboration with another company for the sake of producing something new and innovative for the market place.
4a
The work by Bican et al. (2017) relates to the explanation of IP above in that it shows how important IP can be to a company. It also describes how companies have to engage in open discussions with other companies, which means they must be careful in terms of what they communicate freely and what they keep secret. IP is thus shown to be an intangible asset that cannot be left lying around in the open because other companies are eager to scoop it up. IP is a resource that gives companies a competitive advantage over others and thus must be protected. If it is not guarded safely like any other resource, whether it is fuel or human capital, then other companies could easily take it and begin leveraging for their own interests. For that reason, the study by Bican et al. (2017) relates to the explanation of IP above in that it shows how important it is for companies to protect their IP and keep it safe.
4b
The study by Bican et al. (2017) relates to the work by Mansfield (2019) in that they both essentially make the same point: IP is too important to be shared by one company with another—unless that first company is looking to give up its competitive advantage. It also relates to the work by Zhang et al. (2018), who argue that in the field of medical science and technology IP must also be protected so that advancements in research are not stole by other firms. The study by Wexler (2018) likewise emphasizes this point and makes it clear that IP is a major issue in the criminal justice system because it is viewed by firms as an asset that is of utmost importance. If it were not, there would not be so many cases focused on it in the courts today. Finally, it relates to the study by Yu (2017) because both studies are about the difficulties that companies face when they partner with one another for collaborative purposes while also trying to protect their own IP.
References
Bican, P. M., Guderian, C. C., & Ringbeck, A. (2017). Managing knowledge in open innovation processes: an intellectual property perspective. Journal of Knowledge Management, 21(6), 1384-1405.
Mansfield, E. (2019). Intellectual property, technology and economic growth. In Intellectual Property Rights in Science, Technology, and Economic Performance (pp. 17-30). Routledge.
Wexler, R. (2018). Life, liberty, and trade secrets: Intellectual property in the criminal justice system. Stan. L. Rev., 70, 1343.
Yu, P. K. (2017). The RCEP and trans-pacific intellectual property norms. Vand. J. Transnat'l L., 50, 673.
Zhang, J., Gu, Z., Jang, J., Wu, H., Stoecklin, M. P., Huang, H., & Molloy, I. (2018,
May). Protecting intellectual property of deep neural networks with watermarking. In Proceedings of the 2018 on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (pp. 159-172).