Purpose – Companies have to assess the benefit of supplier innovation before realization. The specific situation of supplier innovation differs from conventional innovation evaluation because a supplier innovation refers to a subproduct for which the supplier is responsible. To date, supplier...

This note expounds the abstract fundamentals of the appropriability problem, re-assessing insights from three classic contributions those of Schumpeter, Arrow and Teece. Whereas the first two contributions were explicitly concerned with the implications of appropriability for society at large,...