Abstract
Intellectual property (IP) ownership aggressiveness constitutes an organization's strategic stance that prioritizes its IP protection. An organization thus pursues a rigid approach to protect its background IP and strives for exclusive ownership of the foreground IP that results from collaborative projects. This paper investigates how firms' IP ownership aggressiveness influences university–industry collaboration (UIC) project success and examines if the relationship is contingent on the governance modes that firms employ in UICs, especially the intensity of contract formality and shared governance. Analysing survey data from UIC projects of medium‐sized to large firms covering four industries, we find that the levels of contract formality and shared governance moderate the effect of firms' IP ownership aggressiveness on project success. Strong contract formality leads to a negative relationship between firms' IP ownership aggressiveness and UIC project success. Conversely, if firms apply strong shared governance, the relationship between IP ownership aggressiveness and UIC project success is positive. Given firms' strategic approach to protect background IP and claim ownership of foreground IP, these results have implications for UIC managers when selecting governance modes to best support UIC project success.
Highlights
Firms increasingly seek external collaborative research opportunities to overcome resource constraints and stay ahead of competition (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Gama, Sjödin, & Frishammar, 2017)
We focus on firms' aggressiveness towards restrictive background Intellectual property (IP) sharing and their efforts at claiming as much of the foreground IP ownership as possible, which we conceptualize as IP ownership aggressiveness
This study's results contribute to a better understanding of the relationships between the novel concept of IP ownership aggressiveness, the governance modes applied, and university–industry collaboration (UIC) project success
Summary
Firms increasingly seek external collaborative research opportunities to overcome resource constraints and stay ahead of competition (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Gama, Sjödin, & Frishammar, 2017). Collaborating with universities offers opportunities to access new research fields and benefit from cutting-edge knowledge (Wirsich, Kock, Strumann, & Schultz, 2016). Firms collaborate with universities in university–industry collaboration (UIC) projects, for instance, to expand their knowledge base and reduce their research and development (R&D) expenditures, thereby enhancing their innovative and economic performance (Bozeman, Fay, & Slade, 2013). The paradox of openness refers to collaboration partners' trade-off decisions to reveal certain intellectual property (IP) and the need to protect their organization's knowledge base against imitation Scholars have hardly studied UIC project management
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