The Role Of Organizational Mechanisms In Preventing Leakage Of Unpatented Knowledge

Firms need to protect their proprietary knowledge assets from imitation in order to appropriate rents from them. A significant volume of scholarly work is devoted to legal mechanisms for intellectual property (IP) protection such as patents. However, there is a dearth of work on how firms can protect their knowledge that is not patented, such as valuable knowledge that is not codified, is inchoate, or otherwise does not meet the criteria for patenting. In this paper we explore organizational processes and mechanisms that firms can use to protect such valuable knowledge from imitation. We explore these mechanisms using interview and survey data from captive R&D centers of multinational firms in India, where the weak IP regime places weak barriers to knowledge leakage.