Do trademarks diminish the substitutability of products in innovative knowledge-intensive services?

Trademarks are often supposed to reduce substitutability and imitability of product innovations. Using data of the German innovation survey, we provide empirical evidence that trademarking firms in manufacturing and services assess easy product substitutability as less characteristic for their competitive environment. This is particularly the case for service firms which are knowledge-intensive, product innovators and which consider trademark protection as important. This suggests that trademarks are an important complementary asset for commercializing innovations in knowledge-intensive services