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Beginning in the early 70s, ACME, a highly innovative and successful U.S. chemical firm, began commercializing an important and versatile polymer invention. This case study chronicles the many travails faced by ACME in obtaining patent protection for its innovations in major developed economies. ACME's experiences suggest that international differences in patent regimes that stem from ideological, historical, and institutional differences are pervasive, and need to be accounted for in a company's patenting approach. International strategy in the patent area is thus inherently multi-domestic. Further, we also observe that in global industries, obtaining a modicum of exclusivity through strong patent protection in certain key markets may be adequate to preserve a firm's competitive advantage versus multinational rivals. Moreover, a firm's patent strategy seems intrinsically integrated with its continuing innovative and commercial performance.

Research has long recognized the importance of collaboration for innovation, but relatively little is known about the strategic drivers of collaborative innovation in firms. We posit that robust collaboration within firms can increase the interfirm mobility of inventors and increase spillovers of innovative knowledge to competitors by mobile inventors. Therefore, by mitigating these value capture hazards associated with collaboration, barriers to employee mobility may induce firms to increase collaborativeness in innovation. Additionally, consistent with the mechanism underlying this proposition, we hypothesize that firms whose innovation entails more complex knowledge, which is known to impede interfirm knowledge spillovers, will increase collaboration less when employee mobility increases. We test these hypotheses by leveraging quasi-exogenous changes in two legal mobility barriers for inventors across U.S. states and find that higher-mobility barriers are associated with greater inventor collaboration (as observed in patented innovation), and this effect is weaker for firms possessing more complex knowledge. These findings deepen our understanding of the strategic tradeoffs between value creation and value capture entailed in collaborative innovation within firms and of human capital strategies that help to manage these tradeoffs.

Recent scholarship on nonmarket strategies has sought to understand organizational decisions to target specific institutional venues for nonmarket actions. We contribute to this emerging literature by studying institutional targeting between specialized and general-purpose tribunals, which are available to resolve disputes in a number of settings. Whereas prior work on institutional targeting has primarily focused on the differences in the policy preferences of public actors and the susceptibility of policy positions to influence activities, we focus on the differences in expertise and procedural flexibility that typically accompany tribunal specialization. We develop a theory about targeting decisions (forum shopping) in such contexts, which suggests two main drivers of tribunal targeting—expected settlement and expected returns. Drawing on these mechanisms, we formulate hypotheses linking tribunal targeting decisions to firm-level attributes such as (market) strategic stakes, institutional distance from competitors, and tribunal-specific capabilities. Our hypotheses are tested using a novel data set of patent enforcement against U.S. imports, which also sheds light on nonmarket strategies in patents.

The current paper complements and extends traditional Penrosean theories of firm growth by examining how a (supplier) firm's relational embeddedness with its portfolio of existing buyers affects its business growth. Our theorizing rests on the foundation that a firm's business growth stems from its breadth (or volume) of opportunities for creating added value with buyers, which more fully realizes the Penrosean vision that firm growth can be explained by a dynamic interaction between productive resources and demand-side market opportunities. Although relational embeddedness may give a supplier dyadic advantages with focal buyers, which supports business growth, we theorize that it can also lead to narrower added value business opportunities with the supplier's entire portfolio of buyers. Critically, we hypothesize that the effect of relational embeddedness on business growth is moderated by a set of relational and demand-side attributes. These hypotheses are tested on a panel data set of patent law firms (suppliers) and their relationships with corporate clients (buyers). We find that greater relational embeddedness is associated with slower supplier business growth, and consistent with our hypotheses, this negative effect is alleviated when these firms have greater cross-servicing ability and receive more relational commitment from buyers but exacerbated when suppliers hold more buyer-specific knowledge and when buyers undertake more (internal) concurrent sourcing. In turn, our research demonstrates how the attributes of a supplier's relationships with its portfolio of buyers can impact access to new business opportunities and thus opens up new directions for research on firm growth, demand-side strategy and buyer-supplier relationships.

In the extant vertical integration literature, the question of how a firm's portfolio of outsourced work is managed across suppliers has been relatively understudied. We seek to advance this area of research by examining factors that influence how concentrated the firm's outsourcing is among its set of suppliers. Using data on the outsourcing of patent legal services, we find empirical evidence that outsourced knowledge-based service work is concentrated in the hands of fewer suppliers when (1) it requires greater firm-specific knowledge, (2) there is a higher level of interrelatedness across outsourced projects, (3) the firm's reliance on outsourcing is high, (4) its outsourced projects are focused on a narrower (capability) domain, and (5) the technological dynamism of this domain is low. Our study suggests that examining portfolio-level phenomena in outsourcing is a useful complement to the predominant focus on transaction-level outcomes in prior research because it provides insights into how firms manage trade-offs across their entire set of outsourced projects.

Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), this paper examines how the combination or bundling of resources influences firm-patenting performance. We hypothesize that firm-patenting output depends not only on research and development (R&D) resources, but also on the patent law expertise combined with R&D inside the firm. We predict that the specialization of this in-house legal resource to R&D enables firms to identify patentable inventions more effectively and to convert them into patents. We also argue that there may be a positive complementary relationship between patent law expertise and R&D, such that patent law expertise will have a larger effect on patent output when it is deployed with matching higher levels of R&D. Furthermore, we predict that the effect of internal patent law expertise on firm patenting will be moderated by organization- and industry-level contextual factors. To test our hypotheses, we examine the patenting performance of a sample of Fortune 500 firms from 1990 to 2000. Results suggest that in-house patent law expertise is a significant predictor of firm-patenting performance; furthermore, this effect is moderated by the firm's level of top management team (TMT) patent law background and industry-patenting pressures. However, our hypothesis of a complementary relationship between patent law expertise and R&D was not supported; instead, we found evidence of a counterintuitive (weak) negative interaction between these two variables. Our findings shed light on how the combination of other resources with R&D affects firm-patenting performance, and advance the integration of complementary organizational perspectives with the RBV.

Whereas capability differences are known to impact governance decisions, what drives heterogeneity in firm capabilities? We propose that capability differences may arise from governance choices related to the focal activity and study how firms accumulate capabilities in the firm-specific, industry-specific, and occupational human capital necessary to perform knowledge work. We theorize that prior outsourcing decisions influence the development of firm- and industry-specific human capital and that buyer–supplier differences in the management of skilled employees can produce systematic differences in capabilities based on occupational human capital. Additionally, we explore some contingencies in the development of these types of human capital and their impacts on outsourcing knowledge work. These propositions are tested with a unique data set on the outsourcing of legal work involved in filing patents (i.e., patent prosecution).

How much credit can be given to entrepreneurship for the unprecedented innovation and growth of free-enterprise economies? In this book, some of the world's leading economists tackle this difficult and understudied question, and their responses shed new light on how free-market economies work--and what policies most encourage their growth. The contributors take as their starting point William J. Baumol's 2002 book The Free-Market Innovation Machine (Princeton), which argued that independent entrepreneurs are far more important to growth than economists have traditionally thought, and that an implicit partnership between such entrepreneurs and large corporations is critical to the success of market economies. The contributors include the editors and Robert M. Solow, Kenneth J. Arrow, Michael M. Weinstein, Douglass C. North, Barry R. Weingast, Ying Lowrey, Nathan Rosenberg, Melissa A. Schilling, Corey Phelps, Sylvia Nasar, Boyan Jovanovic, Peter L. Rousseau, Edward N. Wolff, Deepak Somaya, David J. Teece, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, Yochanan Shachmurove, Ralph E. Gomory, Jonathan Eaton, Samuel S. Kortum, Alan S. Blinder, Robert J. Shiller, Burton G. Malkiel, and Edmund S. Phelps