Managing the intellectual property disassembly problem 2013-04-02 Published in California Management Review (2013), Vol. 55, No. 4, pp. 184-210 © Granstrand & Holgersson 2013 Ove Granstranda) b) and Marcus Holgersson* a) c) a) Department of Technology Management and Economics Chalmers University of Technology SE-412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden b) Phone: +46-31-772 12 09 E-mail:
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[email protected] *Corresponding author Abstract This article deals with the intellectual property (IP) disassembly problem, which is an increasingly important problem in various contexts. The IP disassembly (IPD) problem is defined as the problem of finding a contractual arrangement for allocation of IP rights and licenses that allows for separating and disintegrating a business unit, company, project entity, or IP unit in order to enable a transaction, organizational transfer, or dissolution of it. Based on a comparative case study of corporate transactions of Saab Automobile and Volvo Car Corporation this article conceptualizes and characterizes the problem and then develops an IPD framework for managing it. Acknowledgements The work with this paper has been conducted under the auspices of Stiftelsen IMIT (Institute for Management of Innovation and Technology) at Chalmers University of Technology within the project “Management, Economics and IP Law of Open Distributed Innovation Processes”, financed by the Swedish research and innovation funding agency Vinnova, as well as by Zacco and E.ON. Comments from Bengt Domeij, Thomas Ewing, Bart Leten, participants at the June 2012 European Patent Academy workshop in Munich, two anonymous reviewers, and the guest editors Alberto Di Minin and Dries Faems are gratefully acknowledged.