This is a panel discussion with three innovators-entrepreneurs who are based in Leipzig. The place where we had this discussion, and where they all do their work, is SpinLab, previously a textile factory that is now devoted to innovation for individuals who are starting new companies. They were in a discussion with six academics who are affiliated with the Global Urban Competitiveness Project. We were in Leipzig to hold a research workshop on the subject of ‘City Innovation in a Time of Crisis’, that is, what cities must do to recover from the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We all enjoyed the conversation and benefited from it as well, and we hope the reader will too.

This publication-based dissertation explores how complex technological organizations strategically manage their intellectual property (IP), how their IP capabilities, as dynamic capabilities, change over time, and how the dynamic capability of an IP function and that of a technology function within the same organization coevolve. This dissertation comprises four independent research papers prepared for publication in academic journals with a double-blind peer review process. It consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the knowledge gap in the field of strategic IP management in the context of complex technological organizations, provides an overview of the four research papers, and outlines their current publication status. Chapter 2 presents the first research paper, which involves a systematic literature review and empirical insights from practitioners. It is focusing on the IP capability in business development and operations. Its key finding is contextual factors and strategic approaches for patent licensing provisions in bilateral collaboration agreements between a technological organization and its collaborator. Chapter 3 presents the second research paper, which is an empirical study based on public patent data analysis of Airbus and Boeing. It is related to the IP capability in the legal domain. Its main result is our hypothesized generic evolutionary patent application strategy schema tested by patenting behaviors of the two major competing firms in the commercial aircraft industry. Chapter 4 presents the third research paper which is a single longitudinal case study of Airbus. Its primary findings are a method of taxonomizing and visually presenting dynamic organizational IP capabilities based on a case study of Airbus, and a framework of four generic IP strategies based on the main approach an organization appropriates value from its IP assets. Chapter 5 presents the fourth research paper, which is also an empirical case study of Airbus. Its main results are the IP function's roles, capabilities, interactions with the Technology function, and their three coevolutionary phases. Lastly, Chapter 6 provides a summary of the research theoretical and practical outcomes and contributions, discusses limitations, and suggests potential areas for future research.

Discussion in the scholarly literature about partnerships between entrepreneurs and universities for the creation of technological spinouts, and for helping universities to extract more value from their technology-related intellectual property (IP), is lively. However, the literature exhibits a gap in understanding how business schools may participate in the process of technology commercialization by facilitating the creation of intellectual property rights. In this conceptual paper, we seek to fill this gap in three ways. First, we offer some novel conceptual insights by studying the partnership between technical universities and entrepreneurs using a multi-level approach, incorporating a phenomenological research method, through the lenses of several established theoretical perspectives from the domains of economics, social science, and management: the division of labor, motivation, the nature of the firm, organization, and IP. Second, we develop a working hypothesis focused on learning reinforcement through multiple organizational levels that predicts how business schools may play a prominent role in technology commercialization, together with the theoretical conditions under which they may do so. Third, we offer an IP management model under which business schools, as such, may create and appropriate financial value by generating innovation-related IP that may be transferred to enterprises. Our research reveals a misalignment between promising approaches to university-based technological innovation suggested by normative theory and typical approaches associated with extant practice; and it also highlights a strategic issue, which is that the performance of most universities in the domain of technology transfer is disappointing. We suggest a way to address this misalignment, and this strategic issue, which is through the establishment of what we label as "Technology Innovation Laboratories" in business schools-analogous to technical laboratories usually associated with technical universities-that could generate various types of product- or service-related IP. This type of intellectual property-typically different from invention IP, and which we label here as "business IP"-could be exchanged for equity in spinouts or royalties from licensing, similar to the manner in which the invention IP of technical universities is usually commercialized.

In this work we elucidate international trends in the field of quantum technology (QT) by analysing a global patent database built from an operational definition of QT that was generated through the curated application of artificial intelligence (AI). In doing so, we demonstrate how the sophisticated use of intellectual property information, enhanced by the artful deployment of AI techniques, may produce more reliable and useful revelations for policymakers and managers about global innovation in emerging fields of technology than is possible through conventional methods of data collection and analysis. We also demonstrate the utility of this approach for reliably characterising the evolving constituent sub-fields of QT. By adopting a hybrid human-AI approach to both the definition and the analysis of QT, we have produced some novel insights about global innovation and national organisational profiles in the QT field, particularly concerning dynamic competition between the USA and China.