Author:  M. Hartwell Affiliation:  Independent Researcher Abstract A common business claim—often repeated in classrooms, boardrooms, and social media—is that WD-40 never patented its formula so that “no one would ever know the secret,” and that this choice helped the product remain defensible for decades. This article examines whether that claim is true, what it implies about the strategic trade-off between patenting and secrecy, and how similar logic appears across industrie

Author: Lina Morales Affiliation: Independent Researcher Abstract The rise of open innovation has completely changed the way businesses create, share, and sell knowledge. Companies, universities, and people in the public sector are using more and more collaborative networks, crowdsourcing, university–industry partnerships, and digital knowledge platforms instead of just relying on their own skills. These new models go against old ideas about intellectual property (IP), which