Intellectual Property Strategy and Ecosystem Evolution
Intellectual Property (IP) strategy has been of growing importance as one of the core strategies for technological firms. However, firms confront challenges in enacting and adapting appropriate IP strategies in the increasingly dynamic and complex technological and business environment. To deal with such complex interdependencies and dynamics in firms’ external environment, the innovation ecosystem, as an emerging lens, has been proposed to complement the traditional industry structure framing in the strategy and innovation research. While there have been numerous studies focusing on the generic strategies in the ecosystem, research on IP strategies in the ecosystem has been scarce. This thesis attempts to explore how firms’ IP strategies evolve in the dynamic ecosystem based on a qualitative longitudinal study of four companies (Huawei, Google, Qualcomm and ARM) in the mobile telecommunication ecosystem. Through analysing the evolution of the ecosystem and the four companies’ IP strategies, the research first identifies three emergent theoretical building blocks of the coevolutionary process: IP strategy, ecosystem evolution and ecosystem objectives. Further, through identification of interrelationships between these building blocks, a process model that depicts how IP strategies evolve with the ecosystem and assist firms in playing the ecosystem game was constructed. The process model sheds light on two aspects: first, ecosystem phases and firms’ relational positions in the ecosystem play important roles in shaping firms’ IP strategies; second, through VIII attaining the ecosystem objective, firms’ IP strategies in turn influence the ecosystem phases and firms’ relational positions within the ecosystem, thus driving the coevolution between the IP strategy and the wider ecosystem. The research refreshes the understanding of IP strategy by employing the ecosystem lens. Through this, it provides an alternative description of IP strategy by highlighting its primary aim to fulfil ecosystem objectives and the importance of two key dimensions – openness and defensiveness – in evolutionary ecosystems. Furthermore, the thesis challenges the traditional views on innovators’ IP challenges and relevant IP strategies, which usually focus on imitation from followers and how to prevent it. I argue that challenges for innovators in an ecosystem mainly arise from the ecosystem and vary in different ecosystem phases. The research also advances the understanding of the ecosystem dynamics by explicating the ecosystem evolution, and provide new insights on how to play the ecosystem game.
Intellectual Property Strategy, Innovation Management, Business Ecosystem
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