Innovation modes and intellectual property management in innovative enterprises

Innovation plays an important role in shaping the growth and competitiveness of firms. Innovation is the use of new ideas, products or methods. There are many studies looking for factors affecting innovation. One of the traditional views is that firms actively managing intellectual property tend to be more innovative. However, the relationship between IP and innovation is complex. The effects vary from industry to industry and from country to country. There is a great heterogeneity among firms in terms of how they protect their intellectual property (IP).

The goal of the study is to effectively exploit the potential of innovation surveys to produce disaggregated indicators that identify how firms innovate and what are their IP management strategies. However, appropriate indicators that can capture different aspects of innovation are crucial for the analysis. International organizations increasingly heavily stress the need for improved metrics of innovation. However, classical indicators based on results of innovation surveys and constructed using single variables such as the "innovation rate", are of limited information capacity. The extent to which different practices are adopted by firms varyies. The study tries to shed light on this by applying multidimensional statistical analysis.

Since innovation is a multidimensional process, application of explanatory data analysis may give additional insight into its nature. The methods discussed here may be used to reveal hidden innovation-related patterns across firms, thus leading to better metrics. This paper examines the important role which different forms of science and technology related activities play in explaining business practices. The study develops a set of typologies of innovation modes and then compares them with IP management characteristics. The study is based on a dataset containing results from a large scale innovation survey in Poland, with a carefully crafted extended IP management questionnaire module. The analysis is preceded by a short literature review. Factor analysis and clustering methods are applied to analyze the data and depict associations between variables. The relationships between different modes and IP management practices are analyzed.