Punyapat Saksupapchon, Kelvin Willoughby

• In this paper we combine insights from two streams of literature within the broad academic domain of strategic management - namely intellectual property management and dynamic capabilities - to advance our understanding of the dynamics of competition and innovation in technology-intensive industries dominated by large companies with highly complex products and businesses, large operational scale, and broad international reach. We argue that a firm's IP management capability ought to be viewed as a dynamic capability, as propounded by Teece et al. (1997) and Teece (2007), and we accordingly propose a generic competition-influenced evolutionary pattern of patent application strategies, embodying three development phases: 1) passive strategy, during the early phase; 2) aggressive strategy, during the growth phase; 3) sophisticated strategy at the maturity phase. We test our ideas through a study of the patenting behaviour of two major competing firms in the commercial aircraft industry.