Exploring Intellectual Property Rights and Open Innovation as Strategies for Re-Positioning India for Global Marketing Success

Open innovation is about a culture where ideas and knowledge flow across business boundaries. The boundaries between companies and their environment have become porous, where innovations can get easily transferred inward and outward. Where Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protect the ownership of ideas from getting copied, existence of open innovation culture seems a paradox, since open innovation gives a willingness to allow technical knowledge to spill over to others, whereas IPR protection excludes others from using that knowledge. Geographical Indication, Trademarks, Patents and Copyright are the kinds of Intellectual Property Rights whose importance have increased tremendously in the recent years.Apart from Trademark protections for brands, Patent protection of a technology or the product itself, Copyright encourages authors, composers, artists, designers to create original work by rewarding them with exclusive rights for a certain time period, contra economic exploitation of IPR by licensing for monitory consideration.In the rapidly changing technological environment,Open innovation concept allows authors/creators to grant the users of their work, the right to use, modify, distribute and copy while retaining the ownership of the original work. Open innovation can also be extended in letting to use the rights based in Patents, Trademarks, Designs, Geographical indications, while maintaining the original ownership of rights but not by licensing them for mere commercial benefits.This concept of open innovation as strategic extension of IPR for the functions of marketing a nation brand can possibly help improve the global ranking of India, where innovation becomes a differentiator. This paper attempts to understand this very fundamental thought to explore the role of IPR and Open innovation as strategic initiatives for India's marketing success in the global business environment of innovation led differentiation.