It occurred to me that maybe I was looking for too narrow of an idea. If intellectual property is one output of innovation in industry maybe there were some hints in that literature. I went looking for starting points with the questions:
- How did industry write about and talk about the processes and value of innovation?
- In what ways did industry track and talk about innovation inside firms?
- If a firm was service-oriented, did it take special care to cultivate innovation?
- What, if any, were the differences between innovations in goods and innovations in services?
I would have had an easier time drinking from a fire hose.
There was so much. I wasn’t looking for another Masters degree, just some more targeted thinking about innovation and the strategy firms use with the intellectual capital outputs. I got some recommendations and took a primer approach to my entry into this vast topic.
I leaned towards texts that took the perspective that knowledge is an infinite and human resource. My thinking on taking this perspective was to keep my mind focused on how these concepts could cross-over to a better literature review in the nonprofit sector.
Novice Innovation and Intellectual Property Book Club:
- Alpheus Bingham & Dwayne Spradlin, The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise. FY Press, 2011.
- Henry Chesborough, Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel West (Editors), Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm. Oxford University Press, 2006
- Axel Gosseries, Alain Strowel & Alain Marciano (Editors), Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- William Landes & Richard Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law, Belknap Press, 2003.
- Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, Vintage, 2002.
- Marshal Phelps & David Kline, Burning the Ships: Transforming Your Company’s Culture Through Intellectual Property Strategy. Wiley, 2010.
Two things became clear as I dove in: 1. industry takes intellectual property very, very seriously even when intellectual property is not the primary source of revenue, and 2. I was going to be asking a lot more questions.
