Still collaborating? Strengthening intellectual property protection and collaborative innovation choice for enterprises

Collaborative innovation is important for regional knowledge spillovers, technological progress and economic development. However, there is still a debate on how strengthening intellectual property protection affects enterprises’ collaborative innovation choices. We construct a DID (difference-in-difference) model based on balanced panel data of 1,053 listed enterprises in China over 2008–2021, with a shock to establish event of intellectual property courts in 2014, to explore the impact of strengthening intellectual property protection on collaborative innovation of enterprises. We find that (a) Strengthening intellectual property protection discourages collaborative innovation, controversial collaborative patenting, autonomous innovation among Chinese enterprises and raises enterprises’ R&D expenditures. (b) Avoiding litigation, winning market competition and avoiding financing risk are motivations for enterprises to reduce collaborative innovation. (c) Strengthening intellectual property protection is a greater disincentive to collaborative innovation for enterprises in non-innovation-intensive industries than in innovation-intensive industries, and a greater disincentive to collaborative innovation for latecomers than for firstcomers. We propose to guard against the risk of technological monopolization that exists under intellectual property protection. Our findings contribute to discussions related to economic consequences of intellectual property practices and choice of innovation models for enterprises, supporting policy makers and enterprise managers in their intellectual property and collaborative innovation practices.