The Development of Intellectual Property Strategy in New Venture Creation

Paper in proceedings, 2019

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in intellectual property (IP) strategy and its relation to business strategy. While greatly advancing our understanding of the use and efficacy of different IP rights, most research so far has been solely focused on formal rights, especially patents. Moreover, strategic decisions around IP are often implicitly treated as isolated events, taken by rational decision makers in a relative vacuum. In this paper, we explore the evolution of IP strategy in early venture creation through a case study of 7 startups. By describing the development of the startup, focusing on decisions taken along the way in terms of motives, and outcomes, this study shows how IP strategy has both planned and emergent components. The resulting strategy is a consequence of both causation and effectuation behaviors on the part of startups, and IP decisions are both outcomes of strategy episodes as well as inputs for the next. In this manner, we add to the literature on IP strategy by shifting the focus from content to process and highlighting the importance of interdependencies between IP decisions in shaping IP strategy.