The Role of IP in a Data-Driven Business Model. A Case Study in a Healthcare Company

Abstract

The digital transformation has impacted healthcare actors to reconsider their value offerings. Traditional hardware products are today connected devices that enable more data to be generated and captured by the healthcare actors. Healthcare companies are facing challenges in utilizing data value in their businesses and developing data-driven products. Generating meaningful data analytics and insights are seen to be critical in competition. Intellectual property (IP) has been well recognized in protecting valuable assets for healthcare actors historically, and along with the trend of digitalization, firms are facing challenges to adapt their IP strategies in innovation and product development to fit their data-driven business models. Thus, this study investigates the role of IP in data-driven business models at a global healthcare company to explore their insights into the topic. A single case study was chosen to provide an in-depth research of the topic. A qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews was conducted to collect empirical findings with employees at the studied company Philips. The empirical findings have addressed the evidence that IP's role is central for creating value in a data-driven business model at Philips, where the two most discussed protections are patents and trade secrets. Furthermore, IPs give control points to both hardware and software solutions in the data-driven business model, concerning the acquisition of the raw data as well as the implementation of AI for generating insights. The combination of various IP protections was assessed to provide the key control position against competition. The conclusion from the research emphasizes that the IP strategy must be aligned to the business strategy to ensure value creation in the data-driven business model. The researchers created a new framework to illustrate the conclusion for contributing to the existing theory by integrating technology assets, value creation, and IP into the data value chain. The developed framework TVID (Technology and IP Based Data-Driven Value Framework) is expected to be an applicable model for healthcare actors like Philips to ensure their IPs correspond with the technology assets and value offering in data-driven business models.