Protection Myopia: Managerial Views Towards Intellectual Property And The Implications For Innovative Performance

The strategies firms use to protect their intellectual property and knowledge can strongly influence their ability to capture the benefits of their innovative efforts. Using the attention-based theory, we explore positive and negative sides of legal appropriability. While asserting the benefits from having an orientation towards legal appropriability, we conjecture that protection myopia may lead some firms to allocate too much attention to legal appropriability, in particular when the behavioral and structural contingencies are unfavorable. Examining a panel of three successive waves of a large-scale survey data of UK manufacturing firms, we find that an orientation towards legal appropriability is curvilinearly (taking an inverted U-shape) related to innovative performance. However, this effect is only present when the firms? product innovations are radical or when they are involved in significant product improvements, and/or when their industries are low-tech.