Research On The Influence Of Appropriation Strategy On Profiting From Innovation

From the issuing of the National Medium and Long-Term Plan for Science and Technology Development(2006-2020)to the convening of the 19 th CPC National Congress,?taking enterprises as the mainstay? and ?strengthening intellectual property protection? have always been regarded as the two cornerstones of innovation-driven development strategy.The theoretical basis of above treatment is Schumpeter and Arrow's argument that appropriation can inspire innovation.In Arrow's opinion,patent and intellectual property can give innovators the exclusive right for a certain time,thereby motivating innovators to invest in research and development.However,increasingly facts show that innovation success is not equivalent to business success.Even if innovative products are accepted by the market,the value of innovation may be divided by imitators or complementary asset owners,so that innovators have to leave the market.Scholars have pointed out that actively initiating appropriation strategy by firms is an effective way to protect their benefit of innovation,which include patent application,control of complementary assets,keeping trade secrets and being first mover,etc.Further,the researchers also extensively discussed the contextual factors that influence the effectiveness of appropriation strategies,and made a series of important understandings.Nevertheless,there are still many confusing problems left,which are as following:(1)subjective opinion survey may lead to biased results;(2)the conclusions about the effectiveness of same appropriation strategy varied with different researchers;(3)the influencing factors that explain these variation are too diverse,and the connotations overlap with each other or the generalization is insufficient.This study explain the variation of innovation profit by four appropriation strategies which are patents,trade secrets,complementary assets,and first mover,while treat the complexity and visibility of innovative knowledge as moderators.Based on the survey data of 386 companies in the manufacturing industry this paper objectively analyzes the effectiveness of the appropriation strategies and their influencing factors.The results show that:(1)patents,complementary assets,trade secrets and first moving advantages all have a significant positive impact on the innovation profitability;(2)the effectiveness of the above strategy vary with the complexity and the visibility of innovation.With the complexity of technology increasing,the effectiveness of patent and complementary asset strategies declines while the effectiveness of trade secrets and first mover advantage strategies increases;With the knowledge visibility increasing,the effectiveness of patent strategies increases while the effectiveness of trade secrets and the first mover strategy declines;(3)the impact of knowledge visibility on the effectiveness of complementary assets is not significant.The reason for this may be that when the degree of innovation visibility increases,the company chooses the patent strategy instead of controlling the complementary assets in consideration of the implementation cost.This explanation needs to be verified by subsequent researches.The difference between this study and previous studies is as follow:(1)The contextual factors are treated as moderators,rather than using them to explain the selection of appropriation strategy based on the priori assumption that the appropriation strategies used are effective.(2)Abstracting two variables,namely,technical complexity and innovative knowledge visibility from massive contextual factors,taking them as moderators,rather than simply adopting specific variables such as industry and firm size;(3)This paper adopts quantitative indexes for measuring profitability,reflecting the objectivity of the survey.