Open-source software represents nowadays an essential building block for many products and services. Open communities such as GitHub stimulate interesting debate around the future of Innovation processes and relationships with intellectual property. In this framework, some puzzling questions emerge, such as the advantages of organisations sharing code and the investment of resources into projects which do not provide compensation and on which they have a relatively low level of agency.

This session will delve into this topic by empirically showing the existence of complementarities between open-source software and traditional intellectual property regimes in the production of innovation. By challenging the conventional view about their inherent incompatibility, novel insights will be offered to reconsider the functions and roles of the existing patent system.