Cross-border organizational strategies for knowledge appropriation: Codified and complex technologies
研究了跨国公司在知识产权保护薄弱的国家，如何通过跨境发明团队内部协作来保护研发成果，发现技术编码化和复杂性会影响组织策略的选择。
Appropriating returns to research and development is a crucial concern for firms conducting research and development under weak intellectual property rights regimes. To safeguard against such risks, firms can resort to an internal collaboration strategy in which technologies are developed in cross-border inventor teams. We argue that the adoption of such organizational strategies depends on the characteristics of the technology: its codifiability and complexity. We develop and test a framework in which the adoption of organizational strategies for appropriation is a function of excludability and imitability, with technology characteristics influencing imitability and misappropriation risks. Our patent-level study of cross-border internal collaboration strategies by 613 foreign research and development establishments of 101 leading multinational enterprises suggests strong technological boundary conditions to the use of organizational strategies to deal with intellectual property risks abroad.