How do foreign firms patent in emerging economies with weak appropriability regimes? Archetypes and motives

Foreign firms patent in emerging economies with weak appropriability regimes at an increasing rate. This phenomenon constitutes a paradox since in such a setting foreign firms should have weak incentives to patent. In an attempt to resolve this paradox, we conducted an inductive analysis of 11 foreign firms that patent in such a setting, using the case of China as our empirical context. We identify four archetypes of foreign firms and three key antecedents the interaction of which determines which archetype a firm can be subsumed under.Our study complements the developed-economy focus of the extant appropriation literature by adding an international perspective. We extend previous econometric studies by identifying salient factors on the firm level that determine the extent to which a foreign firm patents in emerging economies with a weak appropriability regime, highlighting that the extent of a firm's motivation to maintain its freedom to operate can supersede imitability concerns. We also comment on the practical implications of these contributions for managers of foreign firms. Highlighting a structural conflict of interest between foreign firms from developed economies and the development goals of an emerging economy, we point to the generalizability of our results to a wide range of other emerging economies worldwide.

► We report how foreign firms patent in emerging economies with weak appropriability regimes, using China as our empirical context.
► We add an international and emerging economy perspective to extant appropriation theory.
► We identify four archetypes of firms and explain in detail how and why their patenting behavior differs.
► We isolate three key variables that determine which archetype a firm can be subsumed under.
► We offer perspectives for the empirical and theoretical generalizability of our findings.