R&D Management has a rich publication history in research on appropriability, intellectual capital and capturing value from innovation. This special issue seeks to update and extend that tradition by explicitly bringing together two adjacent but typically separated conversations.
The first conversation conceptualizes protection of innovation in relation to appropriability mechanisms such as patents, trade secrecy, licensing, contracting, complementary assets, and ecosystem governance to investigate value capture potential.
The second conversation - so far mainly happening in information systems and engineering journals - conceptualizes protection of innovation as information security, such as the protection of R&D artifacts, risks of leakage and theft, industrial espionage, and applications of organizational secrecy for R&D purposes.