Furthermore, it should be noted that reaching a high level of desorptive capacity is not necessarily the most effective way to manage external patent exploitation. On the contrary,as the example of Firm11 in Sect. 5.1.2 demonstrated, firms using external patent exploitation on an ad hoc basis might work more effectively with a relative lower level of desorptive capacity. Hence, firms should establish their desorptive capacities according to their needs, i.e., external patent exploitation frequency and value creation objective.