IPE THRUST SEMINAR | Appropriability Risk and Knowledge Search: Evidence from Mobile App Developers

Although scholars have long examined the antecedents of knowledge search, research on how imitation shapes innovators’ search direction remains thin. We address this gap by focusing on duplicative imitation of digital products, which presents a significant appropriability risk to innovators of original content. Exploiting the jailbreak of Apple’s iOS 7 as a quasi-experiment that triggers duplicative imitation, our analysis shows that after the jailbreak, iOS app developers change their knowledge search directions by increasing search depth and reducing search scope, compared to Android app developers. We further show that following this search strategy is more likely to land on solutions to problems. For innovators seeking to address imitative threats through knowledge search, our findings emphasize that they align search directions with specific characteristics of the threats they face. With this study, we hope to shed some light on the shadow of digitization of knowledge workers and also discuss the adoption of Stack Overflow in strategy research.