{"id":517,"date":"2025-12-11T19:48:24","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T00:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/?p=517"},"modified":"2025-12-11T19:55:57","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T00:55:57","slug":"time-banks-could-ease-the-burden-of-elder-care-and-promote-connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/?p=517","title":{"rendered":"[13]. The Legal Environment of Side Project Ownership and IT Innovation: Evidence from the Alcatel v. Brown Case"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Xi Wu,&nbsp;Charlotte Ren<\/strong>,&nbsp;<strong>and Min-Seok Pang<\/strong>. 2025. Forthcoming,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.25300\/MISQ\/2025\/18022\"><em>MIS Quarterly<\/em>.<\/a>&nbsp; <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.25300\/MISQ\/2025\/18022\">https:\/\/doi.org\/10.25300\/MISQ\/2025\/18022<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Abstract.<\/strong> 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 \u201cemployee innovation at work.\u201d In this study, we leverage an exogenous change in the legal arrangement of side project ownership\u2014the<em>&nbsp;Alcatel v. Brown&nbsp;<\/em>case\u2014to investigate how firms\u2019 enhanced control over side projects influences employees\u2019 innovation performance at work. We find that in states where firms gained greater contractual authority to claim ownership of employees\u2019 side projects, the number of&nbsp;<em>IT patents owned by firms<\/em>&nbsp;decreased. However, paradoxically, the quality of these patents, as measured by the number of forward citations, improved following the legal change. Further analyses of the underlying mechanisms suggest that these contrasting findings likely stem from shifts in both employee innovation behaviors and firms\u2019 innovation strategies post-<em>Alcatel v. Brown<\/em>. Our findings contribute to the information systems literature by highlighting the nuanced effects of side project ownership on IT innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Note:<\/strong> An earlier version of this manuscript, titled \u201c<em>That\u2019s mine! Employee side projects, intellectual property ownership, and firm innovation,\u201d<\/em> was selected for the <em><u>International Conference on Information Systems Proceedings<\/u><\/em> (2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Xi Wu,&nbsp;Charlotte Ren,&nbsp;and Min-Seok Pang. 2025. Forthcoming,&nbsp;MIS Quarterly.&nbsp; https:\/\/doi.org\/10.25300\/MISQ\/2025\/18022 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,16,24,44,27,30,47],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-published-13","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-exploration-vs-exploitation","tag-innovation","tag-intellectual-property-rights","tag-learning","tag-response","tag-social-value"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":523,"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charlotteren.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}