Innovation aims at creating value. Yet, even successful value creation will fail to result in profits if the innovator is unable to capture a sufficient share of this value. The question of how to manage value capture is thus of central importance to practitioners and scholars alike. Numerous studies have addressed this issue, identifying, among others, lead time, complementary assets, secrecy, and patents as mechanisms that enable a firm to capture value from innovation.
However, the extant literature is largely silent on interactions between these mechanisms. Only select pairwise interactions, such as those between copyright and trademark protection have been studied, despite the fact that the concept of resource bundles plays an important role in the resource-based view of the firm. Furthermore, existing studies mostly assume that the innovator competes for the value created by its innovation with market competitors, suppliers, and customers. In doing so, they mostly neglect firms—non-practicing entities (NPEs), sometimes referred to as “patent trolls”—that base their business model entirely on intellectual property rights and focus on enforcing these rights against infringers.