Business Model Innovation and Intellectual Property Management

As an overarching concept a business model describes how a firm creates and captures value for itself, its customers, and its partners. Although research has highlighted the importance of value creation and capture of business models, it primarily focused on the value creation mechanisms and neglected aspects of value capturing: Until to date, little is known about how firms attempt to protect their business model innovations from competition, which depicts one aspect of value capturing. Drawing on a sample of 24 cases, we derive a business model protection framework, which provides insights about how business models relate to IP protection mechanisms for value capture. Our empirical study reveals that the choice of IP protection is contingent on the applied business model. While some business models are characterized by both a high degree of formal and informal protection, others primarily apply informal protection mechanisms to profit from business model innovation.