Tag Archives: IPR

[12]. The Legal Environment of Side Project Ownership and IT Innovation: Evidence from the Alcatel v. Brown Case

Xi Wu, Charlotte Ren, and Min-Seok Pang. 2025. Accepted by MIS Quarterly.

Abstract: Engaging in side projects outside of regular employment has become a growing trend among knowledge workers, particularly information technology (IT) professionals. Side projects offer valuable opportunities for employees to learn new skills and foster creativity. However, the legal ownership of side projects remains uncertain, raising questions about how this affects employee innovation at their primary jobs, which we refer to as “employee innovation at work.” In this study, we leverage an exogenous change in the legal arrangement of side project ownership—the Alcatel v. Brown case—to investigate how firms’ enhanced control over side projects influences employees’ innovation performance at work. We find that in states where firms gained greater contractual authority to claim ownership of employees’ side projects, the number of IT patents owned by firms decreased. However, paradoxically, the quality of these patents, as measured by the number of forward citations, improved followingthe legal change. Further analyses of the underlying mechanisms suggest that these contrasting findings likely stem from shifts in both employee innovation behaviors and firms’ innovation strategies post-Alcatel v. Brown. Our findings contribute to the information systems literature by highlighting the nuanced effects of side project ownership on IT innovation.

[5]. Does experience imply learning?

Jay Anand, Louis Mulotte, and Charlotte Ren. Strategic Management Journal. 2016, 37(7): 1395-1412. 

Abstract. Strategic management research traditionally uses experiential learning arguments to explain the existence of a positive relationship between repetition of an activity and superior performance. We propose an alternative interpretation of this relationship in the context of discrete corporate development activities, which are generally self-selected on the basis of superior performance expectations. We argue that firms are likely to choose to repeat successful activities, thereby accumulating high experience with them. To demonstrate this ‘self-selection’ effect, we examine the performance of 437 aircraft projects launched through three introduction modes. We show that the positive performance effect of the firm’s experience with the focal mode vanishes after accounting for experience endogeneity. We suggest that in a general case, experience with corporate development activities may be tinged with both learning as well as selection effects. Therefore, omitting experience endogeneity may lead researchers to draw incorrect conclusions from an “empirically observed” positive experience-performance relationship.

Click here for the paper: Anand-Mulotte-Ren_2016 SMJ