Ove Granstrand

• PhD
• Professor at Chalmers University of Technology

Purpose The role of patents for appropriating (capturing) value from innovation investments has for decades been of major interest to both practitioners and academics in innovation management. Many studies have implicitly assumed that firms appropriate value through in-house creation and marketing of innovative products and services, and that the m...

Open innovation is usually viewed from inside out a focal firm, facing different strategies for combining internal and external ideas on its path to a product market. Open innovation could also be viewed from outside in as a set of markets for trading different inputs to and outputs from innovation activities of firms and other actors. The purpose...

In today's complex and digital business landscape, innovation is typically not an effort of a lonely genius or an activity confined to a single corporate R&D lab. Instead, the innovation process often involves open innovation, technology trade, and intellectual property (IP) licensing between multiple firms in what is sometimes referred to as an in...

This paper theorizes about innovation governance, especially about governance of open innovation and the nature and role of IPRs. A reinterpretation of open innovation is offered in terms of the emergence of various types of markets for inputs to and outputs from innovative activities. These open innovation markets are typically markets for ideas,...

The concept of innovation ecosystems has become popular during the last 15 years, leading to a debate regarding its relevance and conceptual rigor, not the least in this journal. The purpose of this article is to review received definitions of innovation ecosystems and related concepts and to propose a synthesized definition of an innovation ecosys...

Developing innovations for the digital economy, such as IoT devices and connected mobility solutions is likely to require OEMs to combine IP from multiple sources (licensors) who exploit their IP to as many as possible licensees (other OEMs). Those involved in the provision of what we call distributed multi-IP solutions (d-mIPs) find themselves ent...

As of 2019 technology and innovation management is well established as a discipline in academia and industry, with all its paraphernalia – associations, journals, conferences, schools and institutes all over the world. That was not at all the case 50 years ago when the label hardly existed. The purpose of this article is to make a short review of...

Review of innovation related typologies and models analytical framework. Introduction to innovation and patent economics at micro and macro levels. Overview of the multi-national patent system and its institutional structure.

IC is of major, if not dominant, importance in advanced economies. Adoption of capitalist institutions and pro-innovation policies worldwide. Intellectual capitalism as a knowledge-based capitalist economy has emerged, promoting a strong (and criticized) IP regime with strong growth of registered IPRs. Sweden, S. Korea, Switzerland and the US rank...

Several structural problems existed in the Swedish national innovation system, such as heavy dominance of large firms in R & D and innovation, too few major innovations, especially in new rather than existing business areas, too few mid-sized innovative companies and difficulties for innovative companies to grow into large ones, new innovative larg...

Understanding the economics of patents involves some fundamental difficulties with long-term determined investment expenditures and undetermined, heavily skewed earnings, difficulties accentuated by developments in the pro-patent era. Patent aggression and disputes with large damages claims have been instrumental in raising patent awareness in the...

Micro-motives for using the patent system by and large aligned with macro-motives for having a patent system, albeit with new uses and abuses after the advent of the pro-patent era, calling for new perspectives on the patent system and its trade-offs. A new view is that the patent system provides a contractual infrastructure and a governance mechan...

A first national Swedish government investigation consisted of about a dozen sub-studies of different aspects of the innovation spiral using triangulation with statistics, questionnaires, surveys, case studies, interviews and patent information analysis. A second international investigation with field studies in selected countries with about 200 in...

Internationalization of patenting routes and patenting work in MNCs and decrease of incoming patent applications for PTOs in small countries despite the overall patenting surge during the pro-patent era. The annual turnover of applicants was very high, partly due to annual fluctuations in patenting frequency at company and individual level, dependi...

A changing economy calls for changing institutional roles, e.g. regarding the role of governments and transnational institutions. Develop a national culture for IP and I & E, strengthen the different types of entrepreneurship (independent, corporate, state, university) and innovation systems (national, sectorial, regional, corporate, military, univ...

An unusual spur of IP reform activities has followed in the aftermath of the advent of the pro-IP era. All countries in the sample have made significant reforms for developing innovation-based economies and becoming innovation-oriented countries. The international patent system as a Western capitalist institution has been adopted and strengthened,...

International applicability of the general as well as the special innovation and IP policy recommendations from the national investigation was fairly high, with some exceptions, in line with international policy convergence. A number of important new phenomena and policy issues were found and probed, such as various uses and abuses of the IPR syste...

The aim of this ending chapter is to present a structured summary of the previous chapters and tie them together through lingering on some cross-chapter themes and contributions in view of the aims of the book. Some of the main themes in this book at macro-level will moreover be tied into a previous book of mine 20 years back (as of April 2018) on...

A number of global challenges were identified together with examples of technologies relevant for both solutions and aggravation. Nationalistic innovation policies have to be complemented by transnational innovation policies and collaborations in a global innovation system for meeting global challenges. IPRs can play an important role for innovatio...

Digitaliseringen omvandlar inte bara industrier utan även landskapet med immateriella tillgångar (eller IP för ’intellectual property’). Inte bara den teknologiska komplexiteten, utan även den juridiska, ökar med IP-rättigheter som sprids över olika aktörer och olika teknologier. Hur ska man med rätt IP-strategi gå stärkt ur digitaliseringen?

In this article, we attempt to extend and nuance the debate on intellectual property (IP) strategy, appropriation, and open innovation in dynamic and systemic innovation contexts. We present the case of four generations of mobile telecommunications systems (covering the period 1980-2015), and describe and analyze the co-evolution of strategic IP ma...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate firms’ motives to patent in general, and more specifically how some of these motives depend upon firms’ technology strategies and especially their level of open innovation. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on a questionnaire survey sent to chief technology officers (or e...

This article examines what is termed a “patent culture” in large Japanese companies. While these companies initially developed patent management capabilities under US leadership in order to catch up with Western firms, they have gradually developed specific intellectual property management practices that are now of interest to non-Japanese firms. T...

A property can be defined as a resource with some form of assigned ownership, and an intellectual property is then a property of intellectual or intangible character. An intellectual property right (IPR) is a legally codified right created and used to assign ownership to intellectual resources such as knowledge, technologies, brand names, and other...

OVERVIEW: This article addresses one of the many unexplored challenges associated with closing open innovation—the intellectual property (IP) disassembly problem. This is the problem of disentangling and allocating IP rights at the closing or termination of an open innovation project or when one or more of the vital participants leaves. IP disassem...

This paper gives various indications of market and technology diversification as well as of global market and technology convergence (rather than specialisation) in the context of management, legal and economic convergence. The results show that different countries focus on a wider but increasingly similar set of markets for R&D outputs in the form...

This article deals with the intellectual property (IP) disassembly problem, which is an increasingly important problem in various contexts. The IP disassembly (IPD) problem is defined as the problem of finding a contractual arrangement for allocation of IP rights and licenses that allows for separating and disintegrating a company, business unit, p...

Protecting intellectual property and controlling the use of their inventions is key to the strategy of many firms. At the same time, in order to be successful in open collaborative innovation, firms need to share their knowledge with others. This chapter presents, for moderate specialists, some strategic considerations with respect to managing inte...

Protecting intellectual property and controlling the use of their inventions is key to the strategy of many firms. At the same time, in order to be successful in open collaborative innovation, firms need to share their knowledge with others. This chapter presents, for moderate specialists, some strategic considerations with respect to managing inte...

Fluctuations in patenting frequency and propensity to patent have caught increasing interest, not the least since the emergence of a worldwide pro-patent era. In this paper, fluctuations in Swedish patent frequency are described and analysed, based on statistics and questionnaire survey studies among large and small patentees as well as among IP co...

This paper starts with briefly discussing the 25% rule and the argumentation for and against it. The paper continues with developing a new investment-based method for determining FRAND licensing royalties, a method not only applicable to one-to-one bilateral licensing deals but also to multilateral deals with multiple license sellers and multiple l...

The use of property-like rights to induce innovations of various kinds is perhaps the oldest institutional arrangement that is particular to innovation as a social phenomenon. It is now customary to refer to these rights as intellectual property rights (IPRs), comprising old types of rights such as patents for inventions, trade secrets, copyrights,...

The European Parliament has been working towards building a discussion platform and a resource for further policy actions in the field of intellectual property rights. The Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel has set the goal of further enlarging the area of investigation in light of recent policy developments at the European level. In p...

Based on different contractual forms and their associated degrees of organizational integration, a typology of strategies for technology acquisition (sourcing) is constructed. Based on a sample of corporations in Europe, Japan and US, it is shown that external acquisition of technology through various strategies increases in importance in general....

This chapter attempts to look at the role of IPRs in different innovation systems - national, sectoral, corporate, university and military systems - in a governance perspective. The rapid advent of the pro-IP era from the 1980s on, embedded in the gradual emergence of a new type of economy dominated by intellectual capital, has generally transforme...

In the emergence of a pro-patent and intellectual capital era the management of Intellectual Property (IP) is currently undergoing major changes. IP management systems are becoming increasingly complex and strategic in handling an integrated portfolio of IPRs and intellectual assets rather than just "administrating" patents, trademarks and copyrigh...

During recent years the management of Intellectual Property (IP) underwent major changes. IP management systems became increasingly complex nowadays actively handling an integrated mix of intellectual assets rather than just administrating patents or trademarks as single, independently treated assets. Our paper describes and analyses the historic d...

Recently, attempts have been made to understand the patterns of corporate technological diversification and their implications in economic and managerial dimensions. This book consolidates these attempts and breaks new ground by examining the patterns of technological diversification, and their relationship with internationalisation, economic perfo...

Keith Pavitt has made pioneering contributions to the study of science, technology and innovation. This paper aims to examine some of them on the basis of a bibliometric analysis of Keith Pavitt's work and the impact that he has had. First the paper follows how Pavitt's publication profile develops over time. Then we trace his most cited works and...

This paper summarises a sequence of studies of technology trade and strategies for acquisition and exploitation of technology in large corporations in Sweden, the USA and Japan during the 1980s and 1990s. Licensing in and out, and technology trade more generally, have old origins but have played only a marginal role in most companies across industr...

Recent research in large corporations in the world has shown that technology diversification has important economic and managerial implications with a major potential for growth. While there are many contributions in the literature on business or product diversification of firms, only very recently have there been some attempts to understand the pa...

The emergence of the pro-patent era in the US in the 1980s is symptomatic of a transition towards intellectual capitalism. As a consequence IP issues have entered the agendas of strategic management in industry at large, while previously handled by specialists in the periphery of management attention. As a result there are often missing links betwe...

The fundamental role of innovations and their economic and legal aspects are described as a starter before departure into the book. A number of illustrations of close interaction between economic, legal and technological changes related to IP are provided as a contrast to the long-standing separation of economics from law and IP studies, thereby in...

This concluding chapter summarizes the preceding chapters, using a common structure, which throughout the chapters highlights their main focus, key/novel concepts, approach/empirical data, main findings/arguments, and suggestions for further research. The diversity of the chapters in these respects is rich, which is perhaps not so surprising, but t...

As the economy is shifting weight from physical to intellectual capital dominance, accompanied by the emergence of the pro-IP era, it is natural to try to reassess the traditional challenges, trade-offs and operating standards of the IP system. There is no change in the fundamental nature of information and technology with its associated legal and...

Intellectual property has rapidly become one of the most important, as well as most controversial, subjects in recent years amongst productive thinkers of many kinds all over the world. Scientific work and technological progress now depend largely on questions of who owns what, as do the success and profits of countless authors, artists, inventors,...

This unique book – informed by ten years research – focuses on intellectual property and charts the global transition towards intellectual capitalism with technology-based corporations as prime movers. The book gives a comprehensive overview of the history and fundamentals of intellectual property as well as a textbook introduction to the field. T...

Intellectual property has rapidly become an area of strategic concern for corporate management and technology management within leading companies, with a concomitant growth of IP (intellectual property) resources. The paper describes how large Japanese corporations organise and manage their IP operations, which is quite different from the tradition...

A summary of general interview questions from the questionnaire survey can be found here.

This concluding chapter synthesizes and discusses the findings in the preceding chapters as well as elaborates further on the theme of intellectual capitalism as introduced in Chapter 1. Capitalist economic systems with its many varieties are altogether as strong as ever after the rise of competitive Asian economies, the downfall of the Soviet Uni...

This chapter describes the developments in the organization and management of IP resources and activities in large Japanese corporations. Partly as a result of a long process of catching up with the West and partly as a response to the pro-patent era emerging in the 1980s and the ”patent wars” – hot as well as cold – with US corporations, large Jap...

This section describes one of the sub-studies from the research basis of the book, described in Chapter 1, more thoroughly. This sub-study compared publicly available patent statistics for a number of large Japanese and Swedish corporations. A broad picture of the patenting profiles of the largest Japanese and Swedish corporations is given here tog...

This chapter opens up with a general description of the modern firm as a very viable economic institution, drawing strength from several layers of competitive super-, side- and sub-markets, as well as from the development of management capabilities and from a powerful co-evolution with science and technology. As a result of this co-evolution, techn...

As part of the “patent deal“ between inventors and society, inventors have to disclose information about their inventions in exchange for patent rights. This information should be sufficient to allow a skilled person or team to reproduce the particular invention (although that is not always the case in practice since patentees often try to minimize...

This chapter starts by describing a classification of various motives or advantages and disadvantages of patents from a company point of view and the importance attached to them by the 24 large Japanese corporations surveyed. Four main categories of advantages can be distinguished, which in order of perceived importance were (1) provision of protec...

When, where, how and why have notions about intellectual property evolved? This chapter traces the basic notions of intellectual property to its historical origins and describes how a diversity of IP notions have evolved and which roles they have played. Basic distinctions are made between material (physical, tangible) and immaterial (intangible, i...

This chapter starts with a review of the history of the patent system in Japan. Shortly after the Meiji restoration in the mid-1860s a patent system was tried in Japan, inspired by the perceived importance of new technologies and patents for the development of industry in the West and in the US in particular. Thus Japan’s patent system was installe...

Inventions, know-how, data, software, designs, trademarks and artistic works are all potential intellectual properties and may be protected by Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). Such rights are granted in contemporary society as a stimulus to creative work and innovations. IPRs pertain to specific legal systems embedded in the respective social s...

The purpose of the questionnaire survey for the research studies covering Japan and Sweden was to provide a more general picture of IPR-related facts and perceptions in large corporations as well as complementing other sub-studies in the overall study. A complete list of the companies participating in the survey can be found here. The intention was...

This introductory chapter to the book presents its purpose, background, research basis and outlines of its various chapters together with an overview of developments of intellectual property (IP), intellectual capital (IC) formation and intellectual capitalism. The broad purpose of the book is to present thoughts and ideas about a general, global...

This chapter deals with the commercialization of new technologies in Japan as seen at the national level, the corporate level, and the level of individual product businesses. Various strategies and common features for technology exploitation, i.e. outbound open innovation, will be elaborated upon to provide a broader context for subsequent chapters...

General tables for approximate confidence limits, supporting the calculations made in the book, are presented here.

Based on a questionnaire survey of large corporations in Japan and Sweden, representing chemical, electronic and mechanical engineering sectors, this paper probes three research issues: (1) the level, pace and possible nation-specific mode of internationalization of R&D, (2) the relative roles of demand and supply side factors, and (3) the possible...

Based on a questionnaire survey of large corporations in Japan and Sweden, representing chemical, electronic and mechanical engineering sectors, this paper probes three research issues: (1) the level, pace and possible nation-specific mode of internationalization of R&D, (2) the relative roles of demand and supply side factors, and (3) the possible...

The emergence of the pro-patent era in the US in the 1980s is symptomatic of a transition towards intellectual capitalism. As a consequence IP issues have entered the agendas of strategic management in industry at large, while being previously handled by specialists in the periphery of management attention. As a result there are often missing links...

The modern firm is a very viable economic institution, drawing strength from a competitive market economy, with embedded `super-markets' for corporate control and `sub-markets' for internal organization. The technology-based firm in addition draws strength from its co-evolution with modern science and technology (and vice versa), and thereby become...

The modern firm is a very viable economic institution, drawing strength from a competitive market economy, with embedded `super-markets' for corporate control and `sub-markets' for internal organization. The technology-based firm in addition draws strength from its co-evolution with modern science and technology (and vice versa), and thereby become...

The world's largest, technologically active firms are more diversified in their technological competencies than in their product range, and this diversity is increasing over time. These firms invest beyond their distinctive core technological competencies in order to manage and co-ordinate technical change with their suppliers of components, equipm...

This paper analyzes the evolution and role of corporate entrepreneurship in Swedish industry, particularly for the 1945–1980 period, based on data on the 100 economically most important innovations during this period. Privately owned large corporations (Schumpeter Mark II) dominated in launching innovations in almost all industrial sectors and in a...

This paper explores the nature of technology diversification at the product and corporate levels and shows its strong impact upon growth of R&D expenditures and growth of corporate sales. The emergence of “mul-tech” corporations, that is, corporations operating in many technologies, is demonstrated and the hypothesis that technology diversification...

This volume presents a study of internationalization and foreign direct investments (FDIs) in the telecommunications service sector, paying particular attention to Europe. It offers critical perspectives of the issues involved and analyses by experts.

This paper surveys the current state of the art concerning the management and economic impact of geographically decentralized research and development (R&D) in multinational companies (MNCs). This line of research has recently begun to attract renewed interest, in reflection of not only critical new trends regarding the nature and conditions of tec...

The authors explore the nature of technology diversification at product and corporate level and show its strong impact on the growth of R&D expenditures and growth of corporate sales. The general purpose of the present project is to compare best management practices regarding R&D, technology, and innovation in Japan, the USA, and Europe, and try to...

In many industrialized economies there is an ongoing transition in the market for telecommunication service provision from uncontested monopoly over contested markets to de facto competition. Swedish Telecom faces emerging competition from national entrants as well as international telecommunication service providers, the latter group posing the mo...