This is a great point and I've seen it in action many times among clients - calculating whether to apply for a patent on a new idea or to protect it as a trade secret. In cases where the value is mainly in inaccessible firmware or a manufacturing process where it would be hard for someone to reverse engineer, and even harder to detect if someone did manage to copy it, they typically set up procedures to keep it as a trade secret.

The other side to this, that I've seen among clients, is they really do often make decisions whether to devote money to developing a technology based on the expectation of whether they'll be able to patent it.