Alberto discusses about IP and Open Innovation at the Flanders Business School

Antwerp, Feb.25th. During a presentation in the course of a seminar dedicated to Open Innovation, organized by the Flanders Business School, I introduced the concept of Appropriability Advantage. Together with my friend an co-author Dries Faems:

We define appropriability advantage as a company’s ability to outperform competitors in terms of taking possession of and extracting value from knowledge and technology for productive activities.

The talk was very well received. Prof Bart Van Looy suggested that  “left  the audience with many unanswered questions”, but at this point, we also don’t have the answer to these questions and wanted just to point the attention to what seems to be a promising research area.

Can you map a company's strategy to achieve Appropriability Advantage? Try with these 3 dimensions.

Dries and I basically identified three dimensions that could be used to map the appropriability advantage of a company.  These dimensions are ROI, Strategy and Organization. We claim that it is useful to identify how companies differentiate on these three dimensions with respect to competitors. Innovation is a history of appropriability from the times of Thomas Edison onward.. The increasingly tighter collaboration between technology partners (typical of open innovation dynamics) and higher fragmentation of IP assets, leads managers worldwide to consider with attention how their companies intend to appropriate value on their investment in new technologies and knowledge.