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Appropriation Strategy Lab

Learn how innovative firms capture value from their ideas

🎯 What's This About?

Every time a company creates something new, competitors want to copy it. The appropriation strategy is how firms protect and profit from their innovations.

In this game, you'll face real-world scenarios and decide which combination of tools—patents, secrecy, contracts, brand-building, and more—best fits each situation.

🛠️ Your Toolkit

You'll choose from a mix of protection mechanisms:

Patents Trade Secrets Trade Marks Copyright Lead Time Complexity Contracts Complementary Assets

🎮 How to Play

You'll face 10 scenarios featuring different products and services. For each one, read the situation carefully—think about how easy it is to copy, what's visible to competitors, and what assets matter most.

Then pick the strategy you think best captures value for the innovating firm. You'll earn points based on how well your choice fits the context!

🕹️ Bonus: Value Drop!

Partway through the game, you'll unlock a Tetris-style bonus round! Products fall from the sky — use arrow keys to guide each one into the right mechanism column. Match products to their ideal mechanisms to score big!

It's a fun way to build intuition for matching mechanisms to products under time pressure!

🏆 Earn Your Rank

Your final rank depends on your profit efficiency and how often you pick the best-aligned strategy:

🦋 Butterfly 🦔 Hedgehog 🦊 Fox 🦈 Shark 🐲 Dragon

Developed by Ammon Salter

Contributors: Federico Bignone, Paola Criscuolo, Almantas Palubinskas

Built with AI assistance: Claude, Gemini, GPT-5

📊 This game uses cookies (Google Analytics) to help improve the simulation and to assess patterns of use. We do not track you after use. No advertising, no personal data collected. Change preference

Appropriation Strategy Lab

For each innovation, pick how the firm tries to stop rivals copying it. Think about appropriation mechanisms (formal and informal), complementary assets, and contracts. You have 10 rounds, with a different product or service each time. Rankings go from Butterfly 🦋 to Dragon 🐲.

Round 1 / 10

Total net profit 0

Potential max profit 0

Best-aligned choices 0 / 0

How easy is it to copy?
What can others see?
Key complementary assets:
Market / legal context:

Choose an appropriation strategy

Round outcome

Make a choice to see the outcome.

You will see 10 different situations. No product or service repeats in this game.

Formal tools:

Patents ? protect new technical ideas (if you meet the patent requirements).

Trade marks ? protect names, logos and brand identity.

Informal / practical methods:

Secrecy ? keeping valuable know-how confidential (e.g. recipes, algorithms, processes).

Lead time & first-mover ? staying ahead through speed and learning.

Complexity & tacit skill ? making it hard to copy in practice.

Community & switching costs ? building attachment and making exit painful.

Complementary assets & contracts:

Complementary assets ? manufacturing, sales & marketing, service & support, data, platforms, distribution networks.

Contracts ? NDAs, exclusivity, data rights, non-competes (where lawful), platform terms.

In Teece’s terms, the key question is: who actually gets the money? Often it is the firm that chooses the right bundle of appropriation mechanisms, complementary assets and contractual arrangements for the context.

More about appropriation mechanisms (click to expand)

Patents – when they work and when they fail

Key requirements (in most jurisdictions):
• Novelty – not publicly disclosed anywhere in the world.
• Inventive step – not obvious to a skilled person in the field.
• Industrial application – usable in some kind of industry.

Important: public disclosure before filing (papers, demos, websites) can destroy novelty.

Good fit for: new molecules, engineered components, battery chemistries, some hardware/robotics.
Weak when: software/business methods with easy workarounds; weak enforcement; limited budget.

Trade marks – protecting brand and identity

Protect names, logos, slogans and other signs that distinguish your products or services.

Good for: fashion, apps, platforms, consumer goods, media services.
Examples: Nike swoosh, Spotify logo, distinctive product names and colours.
Limits: does not stop copying of functional ideas or features; protects identity, not technology.

Protects software code, text, images, audio, video, artwork and other creative expression, usually automatically on creation.

Good for: apps, games, user interfaces, artwork, audio libraries, training content.
Limits: protects the specific expression, not the abstract idea or function (others can re-write from scratch).

Secrecy – hidden know-how and information

Works when the valuable information is not visible and access can be controlled (sometimes called trade secrets).

Examples: algorithms, recipes, pricing models, tuning parameters, manufacturing processes.
Needs: NDAs, access controls, security culture, careful partnerships.
Weak when: the product itself reveals the secret on inspection or simple lab analysis.

Lead time & first-mover advantage

Being first to market and learning faster than competitors can give a temporary edge.

Examples: frequent app updates, rapid iteration, early network growth, fast deployment of physical networks.
Limits: advantage can fade quickly if rivals have more resources or better complementary assets.

Complexity & tacit know-how

Some innovations are hard to copy because performance depends on deep experience, tuning and “feel”.

Examples: tuning of robots, complex chemical processes, artisan food and drink, advanced analytics pipelines.
Risk: key people leaving can seriously weaken this advantage if knowledge is not spread or documented.

Community & switching costs

Users stay because they are embedded in a community, ecosystem or habit that makes leaving painful.

Examples: social networks, gaming platforms with expansions, subscription streaks, professional user groups.
Note: this is an informal but very powerful form of appropriation in digital markets.

Complementary assets – who controls the bottleneck?

Assets needed to turn an invention into a product or service at scale: manufacturing, distribution, sales, service, data, regulatory approvals, platforms, agent networks.

Examples: pharma salesforces, mobile money agent networks, cloud infrastructure, hospital integrations.
Key Teece idea: the owner of the critical complementary assets often captures more value than the inventor.

Contracts – invisible but powerful barriers

Contracts shape who can use what, where and with whom: NDAs, exclusivity clauses, licensing terms, data rights, non-competes (where lawful), platform terms, joint development agreements.

Examples: exclusive distributor agreements, long-term service contracts, “no reverse engineering” clauses, data-sharing limits.
Insight: contracts often matter as much as formal IP for actual bargaining power and profit capture.

Appropriation Strategy Lab

🎯 What's This About?

🛠️ Your Toolkit

🎮 How to Play

🕹️ Bonus: Value Drop!

🏆 Earn Your Rank

Appropriation Strategy Lab

Round outcome

💪 What You Did Well

🌱 Areas to Explore

💡 Quick Tips for Next Time

📚 Deepen Your Understanding

🧠 Key Concepts from This Game

🎮 Ready for Another Round?

📖 Want to Learn More?

More about appropriation mechanisms (click to expand)

🎮 Value Drop!

🎉 Time's Up!