Intellectual property protection as a key driver of service innovation: an analysis of innovative KIBS businesses in Finland and the UK

This paper at hand investigates service innovations and Intellectual Property (IP) protection in the sample of 300 Finnish and UK Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) businesses. The results indicate that the formal Intellectual Property Right (IPR) regime is biased towards industrial goods and not as such in a sufficient way to protect IP in the service innovation context. To be able to protect their innovations, service businesses have adopted a wide range of alternative IP management and protection practices. These informal IP protection practices are tailored to accommodate the specific needs of service innovations and they are particularly useful in the situations where innovation is characterised by intangibility, relatively short life cycle and multidimensional nature.

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