AIMS 2015a
Corbel, P. and Kadji NGassam, M. « Marque et modèles d’affaires : le cas des logiciels libres », Proceedings of the 24th conference of the AIMS (Association Internationale de Management Stratégique), Paris, June 2015
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to study the role of the trademark in the case of a weak appropriability regime. The theoretical starting point is the ambiguous place of the trademark in David Teece's "profiting from innovation" model, which has not yet been elucidated in the literature on the complementarities between intellectual property rights. We have based ourselves on three case studies in the field of open source software, which is characterised by a particularly weak appropriability regime. We show that the trademark/brand is likely to play a central role in the business model of open source software publishers: this often consists of selling services peripheral to the software, and owning a reference trademark becomes a key issue in a context where competition cannot focus on differentiating the main product. In this context, the brand is a particularly important complementary asset. Control of a brand can therefore become the subject of conflicts that threaten the long-term survival of projects.
This work therefore reinforces the possibility of using the "profiting from innovation" model as an analytical tool when considering a business model. It also complements the work on the complementarities between intellectual property rights, which is often based on the idea of mutual reinforcement or the extension of the advantages linked to rights with a limited lifespan thanks to the use of other rights, by shedding light on its role when other rights are non-existent or weak. The brand therefore deserves more in-depth treatment in strategic management research as well as in the negotiation of consortium agreements in collaborative projects and in the implementation of their business model. We hope that this paper will help to draw attention to this intellectual property right, the importance of which nobody disputes, but which ultimately occupies a modest place in our strategic analysis models.
Link:
The paper can be dowloaded from the AIMS website.