Intellectual property protection in collaborative innovation activities within services

The research was motivated by the growing importance of inter-firm collaboration within service innovation, which encompasses the risk of knowledge-spillovers particularly due to the intangible service output. The intangibility of most service innovation thwarts applications of formal legal intellectual property mechanisms. Our empirical study provides data that shows evidence of a direct link between innovation partnering and the use of a broad range of intellectual property practices within service-intensive companies. The results show that informal protection mechanisms partially compensate incomplete formal mechanisms and largely prevent imitation and uncontrolled knowledge-spillovers across the duration of the partnership.