Abstract:

It is widely acknowledged that intangible assets play a relevant role for companies in creating and developing their core competences, thus yielding competitive advantage and leading to innovativeness. This paper aims at analysing the new investments and divestments of intangibles companies perform in the context of open innovation. The framework is applied to a sample of 271 science-based companies operating in the bio-pharmaceutical and technology hardware & equipment industries for the three years period from 2010 to 2012. Results show that, in the bio-pharmaceutical industry, the analyzed transactions are not relevant since open innovation is far more oriented to revenues and costs. On the contrary, in the technology hardware & equipment industry, the acquisition of intangibles is widely diffused, particularly within business combinations. The paper contributes to the existing research on open innovation by underlying the role of knowledge and intangible assets in the strategies companies pursue for opening up their processes.