Not invented here?

Is the "competitive" advantage of "Innovation" as an intellectual property getting diluted?

In Innovation through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack and his research collaborators interviewed some 100 managers from 20 firms to gather best practices of the companies that do collaborative innovation correctly.

They discovered that COLLABORATION is becoming a key driver due to product complexity, availability of a low-cost but highly skilled labor pool, and advances in development tools.

Further, collaboration enables shorter development lead times, increasing capacity, and AN ACCESS to skills, capabilities, and intellectual property that a firm does not possess internally.

Of course, this brings unique challenges:

In a case study, more than 200 people from one firm and its three partners were involved in developing software for a new system-on-a-chip design. Initially, all team members had access to the firm’s entire code repository, including much code unrelated to their own work. Then they realized the risk of exposing a thousand person-years of code and changed the system to expose only the IP necessary for each partner to meet its goals.

The 23-page Full Working Paper Text can be downloaded from http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-079.pdf.