In some industries, business process innovations
will be highly observable and hard to keep secret (weak regimes of appropriability),
while in other industries business processes may be difficult to imitate because of lower visibility
or the skills/competences or complementary resources needed to exploit the knowledge
(strong regimes of appropriability) (Levin et al., 1987; Zander and Kogut, 1995). Lead
time to implement changes and availability/form of legal protections are other examples of
industry differentiators that may affect appropriability (Nieto and Perez-Cano, 2004).