Intellectual Assets:
The Invisible Foundations of Innovation Ecosystems
Innovation ecosystems are often described by their visible components, including which organisations are involved, where funding flows, and which networks are active. Beneath this visible layer lies another, less visible foundation: the intellectual assets that make collaboration possible.
These assets include far more than patents. They encompass data, software, know-how, standards, methodologies, prototypes, and governance arrangements. In collaborative research and innovation (R&I), they often appear under technical labels such as background and foreground. Yet collectively, they raise a broader question: how can the knowledge created collectively be leveraged to generate impact?
The Hidden Infrastructure Of Collaboration
Drawing on practical experience and on a broad pool of collaborative R&I projects, Future8 sees that collaboration does not succeed by goodwill alone. Bringing universities, companies, start-ups, public authorities, intermediaries, investors and civil society around the same table is necessary, but not sufficient. What makes ecosystems work in practice are the conditions that allow knowledge to circulate, be used, and create value.
This is precisely the dimension that the European IP Helpdesk addresses in its latest Bulletin on Managing IP in Innovation Ecosystems. This edition’s strength lies in showing, through curated expert contributions, that intellectual assets management, including intellectual property, is not a peripheral legal concern. It is part of the architecture that determines how innovation ecosystems function, scale, and deliver impact.
From Protecting Knowledge To Enabling Its Circulation
Traditional IP thinking focuses on protecting results while in collaborative R&I settings, this perspective shifts towards organising access, use, protection and sharing so that knowledge can create value. This shift strengthens innovation ecosystems by helping coordinate relationships between actors, enable investment, reduce uncertainty, and support scaling.
Intellectual assets management becomes particularly strategic when collaboration moves beyond bilateral partnerships and into complex multi-actor ecosystems. In such settings, results are rarely created by one actor alone. Beyond the result itself, the value lies in how contributions from different partners are combined.
Trust and governance go hand in hand with this approach. Clear agreements on knowledge, data, access, confidentiality and ownership create a safe space for partners to collaborate. This is particularly important where a diversity of actors such as universities, SMEs, public authorities, citizens, intermediaries and larger companies may all have legitimate but different expectations.
Innovation Ecosystem Design In Practice
Several key takeaways emerge from the Bulletin about the role of intellectual assets management in structuring innovation ecosystems. The interview with Marcus Holgersson is especially valuable in this respect. His work on innovation ecosystems highlights not only actors and collaboration, but also activities, institutions and artefacts, meaning technologies, patents, products and other resources. Importantly, his perspective broadens the discussion from “who collaborates” to “what structures collaboration”, pointing to intellectual assets management as an element of answer.
The Bulletin provides several nuanced approaches to draw from in this regard. Aarhus University’s Open Innovation in Science model, for instance, drives precompetitive collaboration where foreground knowledge is shared openly while background knowledge remains protected. The model addresses IP considerations upfront, creating a secure environment for collaboration. The FOODLAND impact licensing case offers another perspective, where intellectual assets are used not only for commercial exploitation, but also to support both social impact and commercial scalability.
These examples reflect a central message echoed by Future8: intellectual assets management should be embedded in collaborative R&I design from the start, rather than approached as a mere administrative annex. In practice, this means asking early questions such as: What knowledge is being brought into the collaboration? What will be jointly created? Which results should be protected and which should remain open? Who needs access to what, and when? How can communities benefit fairly from the outcomes?
A Strategic Capability For Europe’s R&I Future
These insights align with the direction of travel in European R&I policy which points to a broader ambition: turning research results into economic and societal value at scale, across ecosystems, regions and markets. This is particularly relevant in discussions on the next Horizon Europe programme for 2028–2034, where valorisation and exploitation are expected to play a central role, with stronger links to competitiveness and closer synergies with the future European Competitiveness Fund.
With value creation increasingly understood as multifaceted and extending beyond technological outputs to include social innovation, local knowledge and broader societal outcomes, this forward-looking agenda reinforces the need to treat intellectual assets management as a strategic capability.
For Future8, reflecting on the perspectives brought together by the European IP Helpdesk in this Bulletin, this is where intellectual assets management connects directly to the future of collaborative R&I in Europe. Innovation may be most visible in its outcomes, but its real durability is shaped much earlier, in the invisible foundations that govern how knowledge moves through an ecosystem.
Image: Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash
