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The dynamic use of appropriability mechanisms

The phenomenon that imitators may profit more from the innovation than the innovating enterprise has attracted attention from scholars and practitioners. As important means to enhance the ability of innovators to capture the value created by their innovations and to profit more from their innovations, appropriability mechanisms are used to protect innovations and impede imitators. Although it has been perceived that the use of appropriability mechanisms varies across industries and changes with times, few studies have examined the changes in the use of certain appropriability mechanisms at the industry level.

This study seeks to enhance the understanding of the dynamic use of appropriability mechanisms by delineating how the use of certain appropriability mechanisms changes in different industries and across industries. To this end, data from two Community Innovation Surveys with twelve-year time interval is analyzed by employing IBM SPSS Statistics 24 software to produce industry-specific and cross-industry descriptive statistics and correlation results.

The main finding is that industries share some similarities regarding the dynamic use of appropriability mechanism, but the detailed changes in the use of each appropriability mechanism differ greatly from industry to industry. For example, nearly all industries enhanced the use of each appropriability mechanism as time went by. However, the degree of enhancement, which can be reflected by relative rank of each appropriability mechanism, is quite different among industries. This finding is consistent with previous literature suggesting that the use of appropriability mechanisms is changing with the evolution of enterprises and industries.

We also found that certain appropriability mechanisms are used combinedly and that the previous use of patent, copyright, and registered design is positively and significantly correlated with the use of specific appropriability mechanisms after years. It can be inferred that the use of appropriability mechanisms is not alone and is not a one-off. This study contributes to the existing knowledge mainly by stressing the dynamics exist in the use of appropriability mechanisms, and by viewing the dynamic use of appropriability mechanisms at the industry level.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:oulo.fi/oai:oulu.fi:nbnfioulu-201711293195
Date29 November 2017
CreatorsYang, J. (Jialei)
PublisherUniversity of Oulu
Source SetsUniversity of Oulu
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, © Jialei Yang, 2017

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