From Managing Innovation to Governing Value: Reconceptualizing the Role of Intellectual Property in the Sustainable Business Model

Journal article, 2026

The role of intellectual property (IP) in promoting or hindering sustainable innovation now forms a topical issue in innovation management. Its role in the sustainable business model remains imperfectly understood however, creating a simplified view of IP in relation to corporate sustainable development. Hence, this study sought to examine how IP was used to manage value rather than innovation in the context of sustainable entrepreneurship as practiced in the fashion industry. Studying the IP decisions of 24 ventures, motives were compared against those found in the existing literature to reconceptualize the role of IP, from managing innovation to governing inclusive flows of value across a value network. However, relating IP to economic, social, and environmental value creation and capture revealed asymmetries, with IP enabling an economic imperative as opposed to providing a social and environmental incentive.