Collaborating in a Research and Development Project: Knowledge Protection Practices applied in a Co-opetitive Setting

Abstract

Organisations participate in collaborative projects that include competitors for a number of strategic reasons, even whilst knowing that this requires them to consider both knowledge sharing and knowledge protection throughout collaboration. In this paper, we investigated which knowledge protection practices representatives of organizations employ in a collaborative research and innovation project that can be characterized as a co-opetitive setting. We conducted a series of 30 interviews and report the following seven practices in structured form: restrictive partner selection in operative project tasks, communication through a gatekeeper, to limit access to a central platform, to hide details of machine data dumps, to have data not leave a factory for analysis, a generic model enabling to hide usage parameters, and to apply legal measures. When connecting each practice to a priori literature, we find three practices focussing on collaborative data analytics tasks had not yet been covered so far.