Shall I tear down the wall? How to protect proprietary knowledge and simultaneously learn from my research partners

摘要

In this empirical study we investigate if learning efforts and the simultaneous protection of proprietary assets lead to superior collaboration success. To analyze these research questions we conducted a survey in a Chinese-German academic research collaboration, employing a standardized questionnaire and structural equation modeling. The results show that the protection of proprietary knowledge assets only leads to superior collaboration success, when the parties solely focus on the acquisition of tacit knowledge. While the protection of proprietary knowledge assets, on the other hand, is also positively associated with the acquisition of explicit knowledge, explicit knowledge, in turn, is negatively associated with collaboration success. Although learning also has a direct positive influence on collaboration success and is positively associated with both the acquisition of tacit and explicit knowledge, the influence on collaboration success via explicit knowledge acquisition mechanisms is negative. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the obtained results, pointing at future research opportunities and highlighting theoretical and practical implications.