Facilitating Open Innovation: Focusing on IP Management Rather Than IP Rights

In a closed innovation company, intellectual property (IP) strategy is typically one of defense. In fact, some companies pursue trade secret approaches because even using patents is considered too risky of an exposure to their critical competitive advantage. In an open innovation company, traditional IP strategies hamper adoption and execution of innovation. Open innovation encourages sharing ideas and solutions with another company, not being closed and secretive. What IP strategies, infrastructure, and processes need to be in place for open innovation to thrive? In this paper, a literature review is completed toward an attempt to consider the main methods of open innovation IP protection, valuation of that IP, IP marketing/brokering infrastructure, innovation enabling aspects of IP protection methods, and general obstacles to collaborating on IP usage and creation in an open innovation environmen