Upstream and downstream management of intellectual property rights within emerging platform ecosystems

Abstract

This research underlines the role of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to manage knowl-edge in the development of complex systems such as platform-ecosystems without an orches-trator actor. These ecosystems are straightaway registered in an inter-organizational inno-vation model around a ‘core’ platform which structures their existences. Thanks to NiceFutur Campus (NFCampus) case study, the paper shows how the upstream and down-stream management of IPR contributes to the emergence of Near Field Communication(NFC) platform-ecosystem. It also proposes several theoretical contributions both on the ris-ing ecosystems and on the open innovation literature. These contributions concern thestructuring role of IPR in the birth of an ecosystem, the articulation between tacit and ex-plicit knowledge and the open degree of the technological platform. The paper highlights be-sides practitioners and local public actors on the way IPR may favour or slow down the in-dustrialization of numerous current experimentations in NFC domain, or more generallyon how IPR management contributes to the success deployment of innovation emanatingfrom a platform-ecosystem without an orchestrator actor.