Strategic Management of Intellectual Property Rights for Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Study of Indian Chemical Industry

This paper aims to explore the role played by the management of intellectual property rights (IPR) as a key driver of business strategy in firms for attaining competitive advantage. The presented paper also proposes a strategic framework majorly suited for Indian innovation prone industries for managing IPR in their bid to outdo the competitors. This study investigates firm’s strategic management of IPR through the constructs of innovation, number of IPRs obtained, utilization of IPRs and its alignment with business strategy leading to competitive advantage by either having cost advantage or differentiation advantage in the domain of Indian high-tech industry. Authors found a strong positive relationship between competitive advantage and ‘IPR alignment with business strategy’ which indicates that, better the alignment between intangibles assets like IPR and business strategy, more is the competitive edge help by the firm. Interestingly, being more innovative does not assure sustainable competitive advantage. Theoretically, the presented work builds up a framework for strategic leverage of intellectual property rights in order to consolidate organizations’ competitive positioning in the market. The presented study shows the way strategic management of IPR can help in improving the competitive positioning of an organization as it is among one of the major factor affecting the quest of an organization to attain competitive advantage. Businesses are well advised to invest in creating a strategic pool of IPRs. This can be achieved by developing an innovative organizational culture and by treating IPRs as any other valuable strategic resources. This is among the few studies concerning management perspective of IPRs in Indian context that emphasizes on the strategic usage of the IPR which is primarily seen as a legal instrument. The presented study is distinct in nature as it advances the current extant literature related to the establishment of IPR management in high tech industries.