Abstract
With the rapid development of technology and trend, not only let deliver and accumulation of information and knowledge become faster and faster, but also help industry, companies enter a new era of knowledge economy. When industrial structure gradually changes from manufacturing, traditional service to the knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS), knowledge and information have become the source of innovation and company’s competitive advantage. With the rapid development in information technology industry, knowledge flows more quickly and hard to preserve. Therefore, it’s very more important to protect innovation and knowledge. However, in previous studies, knowledge protection and innovation protection are focused on manufacturing and traditional service. These protection patterns and way in previous not only lack empirical research or specific industry in KIBS industry but also seldomly dicuss knowledge view and knowledge type. So, this research expands the perspective of knowledge and classifites knowledge into product knowledge, management knowledge, customer knowledge and other knowledge. This research try to find formal and informal protection mechanisms with different types of knowledge by exploratory research to provide knowledge-intensive business service a new perspectives and practical prorection patterns. We found that this prorection patterns have same opinion in literature, however, one of the biggest difference is we discuss the protection of customer knowledge, that’s rarely mentioned before. Especially, in the perspective of services, customer knowledge is very important source of innovation. Therefore, we found that beside the protection of product knowledge and management knowledge, protection of customer knowledge is the key if company wants to sustain its long-term impact competitive advantage.