Unveiling the relationships among intellectual property strategies, protection mechanisms and outbound open innovation

Many articles in the open innovation literature studied the link between intellectual property protection mechanisms and openness, obtaining contrasting results. This paper bridges the literature on protection mechanisms and the one on intellectual property strategy. It leverages three high-level intellectual property strategies—defensive, collaborative and impromptu—recently defined in the literature to identify how they entail different intellectual property protection mechanisms and approaches to outbound open innovation. The article advances that defensive, collaborative and impromptu are characterizing factors of intellectual property strategies. An exploratory analysis of 73 manufacturing firms allowed identifying five intellectual property strategies: defensive, purposely defensive, collaborative, developing impromptu and impromptu. The article describes their differences in intellectual property protection mechanisms and outbound open innovation. Furthermore, a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis identifies the optimal combination of formal, semiformal and informal intellectual property protection mechanisms to nurture outbound open innovation. The results are discussed in view of the extant literature, and implications for scholars and practitioners are presented.