When Governance Lags Innovation: Hidden Temporal Frictions of Innovation Governance

Innovation research has long emphasized structural and strategic alignment, yet has paid comparatively little attention to what happens when governance mechanisms fail to keep pace with changing innovation practices. This paper examines how innovation governance increasingly lags behind innovation itself, as institutions central to innovation—such as intellectual property rights and related governance arrangements—remain anchored in temporal assumptions that no longer correspond to contemporary innovation dynamics. While innovation cycles have become faster, more fluid, and more project-based, many institutional arrangements continue to rely on fixed durations, stable sequencing, and long-term horizons. Using intellectual property as an illustrative case, the paper shows how governance mechanisms simultaneously function as strategic assets for value appropriation and as institutional devices for coordinating access and collaboration over time. These roles rest on distinct temporal logics that become increasingly difficult to reconcile in dynamic environments shaped by digital technologies, platform ecosystems, and real-time data. The resulting temporal frictions can generate hidden coordination costs, distort incentives, and undermine effective governance—phenomena that are not well captured by existing debates focused on institutional strength or scope. By foregrounding temporal assumptions as a design concern in innovation governance, the paper highlights time as a critical yet underexplored dimension of how innovation is governed when institutional arrangements lag behind evolving innovation practices.