the roles of intellectual property rights in the networked enterprise: the growing importance of coordination in innovation networks

The networked enterprise simultaneously seeks to develop new knowledge in order to be able to compete on international markets thanks to its innovation capacity and to improve its process of allocation of resources, notably by reducing its production and organisational costs. In this paper, we study the functions of intellectual property rights in these productive and organisational objectives of the networked enterprise. Intellectual property rights are usually studied in relation to their incentive/defensive and offensive roles. But do they play a role in the organisation and notably in the coordination of activities within the networked enterprise? We consider that they have an important ‘coordination function’, making easier the relationships between all the fragmented parts of the networked enterprise. This coordination role is moreover gaining ground in the context of collaborative innovation (innovation networks). It is thus associated to the ‘incentive/defensive function’ of IPRs, aiming at protecting and thus giving incentives to the constitution of the firm’s innovation potential, called here ‘knowledge capital’. This coordination function is also associated to the ‘offensive one’, relying on the construction and the reinforcement of entry barriers which largely contribute to define the position of the networked enterprise within the innovation network to which it usually belongs. The paper concludes by stressing the relationship between the functions of IPRs in networked enterprises and the extension and strengthening of IPRs at the global leve