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The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate firms’ motives to patent in general, and more specifically how some of these motives depend upon firms’ technology strategies and especially their level of open innovation.

The paper is based on a questionnaire survey sent to chief technology officers (or equivalent) of the largest R&D spenders among Swedish large firms (e.g. ABB, AstraZeneca, Ericsson, and Volvo) and among Swedish small and medium-sized enterprises. Principal component analysis and multiple linear regressions were used to check the impact from open innovation upon the importance of 21 different motives to patent, with a specific focus on protection and bargaining related motives.

The most important motive to patent is to protect product technologies, but protecting freedom to operate is almost as important, followed by a number of other motives. Increasing importance of open innovation in firms is related to stronger bargaining motives to patent, and even stronger protection motives. In fact, when comparing with closed innovation, the results show that open innovation is more strongly positively related with all different motives to patent except for one (to attract customers). This indicates that firms find it more important to patent when engaged in open innovation than when engaged in closed innovation.

The paper reports results from the first study that links patenting motives to technology strategies. It contributes to an emerging stream of empirical studies investigating the role of patents in external technology strategies and open innovation, showing that the motives to patent are strengthened within open innovation settings.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The most important motive to patent is to protect product technologies, but protecting freedom to operate is almost as important, followed by a number of other motives. Increasing importance of open innovation in firms is related to stronger bargaining motives to patent, and even stronger protection motives. In fact, when comparing with closed innovation, the results show that open innovation is more strongly positively related with all different motives to patent except for one (to attract customers). This indicates that firms find it more important to patent when engaged in open innovation than when engaged in closed innovation.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the papers in context.

Do patents hinder open innovation and collaboration? The protective and secretive nature of the patent would suggest that it does. After all, if a company wants to hide or protect a product then, surely, they are unwilling to work with others? Holgersson and Granstrand (2017) look at the role of patents and the motives behind their applications to see if open innovation is being hindered. Ultimately, it seems, patents may stifle innovation to some degree, but the security that they provide actually encourages firms to collaborate with others. By removing the fear of intellectual theft or loss of revenue, patents free-up innovators to work with others to enlarge the market they have just created.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Patents as one of the important components of intellectual capital are emerging as a new source for mining insights on open innovation (OI) practice of the organizations. Their role in value creation through collaboration and the inter-firm differences is yet to be explored in depth.

To achieve the aim, survey data is analyzed to rank OI practices (collaboration) of the firms, while patent data are analyzed to carry out descriptive and bivariate analysis to study the inter-firm differences in collaboration.

The survey findings highlight mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and patent pooling as the top two preferred modes of OI, while from patent data M&A has emerged as a predominant OI practice for mainly nonresident firms. At the firm level characteristics, out of firm age, number of granted patents and firm size, firm age has been found to be somewhat significant in few cases of OI practices.

It provides an alternative source, in this case patent data to study open innovation capabilities of firms in India. There is contribution to the patent value theory from profit motive to deriving strategic decisions on collaboration.

The managerial implications of this study lie in realizing granted patents as important business tools for seeking collaboration, tracing competitive intelligence and the geography of innovation of the firms' competitors.

The dataset of granted patents at the Indian Patent office (2005–2017), the sample of pharmaceutical firms drawn from this list of patents, patent data– based OI insights and the use of multiple imputation technique to missing data for meaningful insights are some of the unique aspects of this paper.

The purpose of the study is to propose a new perspective to explain how China's rapid growth in patenting is partially driven by corporate strategic patenting to influence local governments. The authors highlight the role of strategic patenting and local government-business relations in creating the gap between the patent boom and underlying technological progress in China.

The authors investigate the relationship between local government-business relations and corporate strategic patenting behaviors, measured as a higher ratio of patent filings to patent awards, by collecting data from three successive NADS surveys of government-business relations in 292 Chinese municipalities, paired with detailed patenting and subsidy data of 3,756 publicly listed corporations obtained through text mining.

The authors find that, while R&D investment and patent subsidies do drive corporate patenting, firms in jurisdictions with lower-quality government-business relations are more likely to engage in strategic patenting. Moreover, the negative impact of government-business relations on strategic patenting is moderated by political connections, as the strategic patenting of firms without political connections is more sensitive to government-business relations. The authors further show that firms obtain significant benefits from patenting in the form of additional subsidies from local innovation and industrial policies in the years following.

Rolling back patent subsidies will reduce strategic patenting to a limited extent. The local governments in emerging markets need to increase the capacity to implement industrial policy and provide market-based opportunities for firms to access innovation inputs.

The authors provide an updated and fresh perspective to understand the phenomenon of China's patent boom by showing that patenting can be driven by corporate strategies to adapt to local institutions and influence government policy. The authors extend the analysis of strategic patenting to emerging markets.

The role of patents for appropriating (capturing) value from innovation investments has for decades been of major interest to both practitioners and academics in innovation management. Many studies have implicitly assumed that firms appropriate value through in-house creation and marketing of innovative products and services, and that the main function of patents is to protect the exclusive sales in product and service markets. We challenge this assumption in light of the variety of business models, strategies and markets now being available, including different organizational and market forms of open innovation.

A conceptual framework and typology of open innovation markets is developed, and the role of patents for appropriation is investigated in these markets among 172 Swedish technology-based firms.

The results show that the importance of patents has a skewed distribution with some firms rating patents very important and with a fat tail of firms rating patents less important. Most importantly, the results indicate that patents are enabling exchange and technology trade in various types of open innovation markets rather than only supporting vertically integrated business models. Thus patents were found to help rather than hinder the use of open innovation markets.

The paper makes two main contributions. First a theoretical reinterpretation of open innovation with a conceptualization of open innovation markets for appropriation of innovation values. Second an empirical illustration of new roles of patents for appropriating innovation values in these markets. The paper in addition illustrates the use of a counterfactual approach to questionnaire surveys, as well as the complementarities between patents and other means of appropriation.

Extant research and practice of patent management are often occupied with how to best utilize patenting as a source of competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a patent management trichotomy where firms make strategic decisions between patenting, publishing, and secrecy.

The paper is conceptual in nature and draws on received IP management literature to develop an analytical framework.

The authors suggest that the choice between patenting, publishing, and secrecy can be understood in terms of differences in the degree to which the firm can appropriate value from the invention and the degree to which it can operate freely.

Through an analysis along the dimensions of direct and indirect appropriation as well as static and dynamic freedom to operate, the paper conceptualizes the choice between patenting, publishing, and secrecy in a way useful for managers as well as for academics.

While the current anti-globalisation wave is considered as a regional and cyclical relapse among Western countries, the new era of globalisation has shifted away from stagnant developed economies towards the rising prosperity of emerging Asia, where it is attracting substantial global inward foreign direct investment (FDI). Focussing on Vietnam, the country that is seen as Asia’s next economic tiger, the question of how important intellectual properties (IP) protection is in the international competition for FDI inflows is still unsettled, especially on the under-researched topic of trademarks.

This paper takes on the business history approach, which allows rich evidence from the dynamic and evolving natures of multinational enterprises (MNEs) to drive the research process, so that international business scholars can test models rigorously. The evidence provided in this paper is essentially qualitative and combines trademark registrations data, with trade and FDI statistics between 1986 and 2016, also draws on companies’ archives, industry reports and related newspaper articles.

This paper provides the chronology of intellectual property right (IPR) legal landscapes and the dynamic co-evolution of trademarks and FDI inflows in Vietnam. Three trademark protection strategies for MNEs and their patterns here are addressed. The paper also argues that trademarks bring new insights and IP protection strategy for pharmaceutical MNEs for the case of Vietnam is as important in trademarks as it is in patents. In emerging markets with strong incentives for FDI such as Vietnam, MNEs are not necessarily put off by weak IPR, but rather create alternative strategies for dealing with the lack of IP protection in these emerging market settings.

This study challenges the stream of thoughts that view trademarks as a “neglected intangible asset” among different IPRs, while in fact, trademarks advance MNEs’ knowledge by ensuring competitiveness and long-run survival in emerging markets. This paper is among the first few attempts to look at pharmaceutical industry through the lens of trademarks, moving away from the traditional patent-focussed approach. It extends the understanding of OLI paradigm and highlights that MNEs need to possess Oa and Op advantages not only at the beginning of internationalisation process but rather evolving through the time to cope with imitation risks in the host country.

Patent litigation consists of non-market actions that firms undertake to access intellectual property rights defined by prior legislation and enforced by the courts. Thus, patent litigation provides an interesting context in which to explore aspects of firm’s non-market strategies. In contrast with prior non-market strategy research that has largely focused on how political institutions define the rules of the game for market competition, non-market actions within patent litigation primarily seek to access and apply these broad policies to specific situations, products, or assets that matter to the firm. Furthermore, because such non-market actions are directly influenced by the firms’ market strategies, they represent a promising area for research on integrated (market and non-market) strategies as well.

The goal of this paper is to explain how generic patent strategies that firms use to support their competitive advantage in the product-market influence non-market outcomes related to the timing of patent litigation resolution. In contrast with prior research that has studied settlement in patent litigation essentially as a one-shot bargaining game, this paper seeks to explain litigation resolution as an outcome of the competing mechanisms of settlement and adjudication that operate continually during litigation. Using a large sample of patent litigations in research medicines and computers, I model the timing of patent litigation resolution in a proportional hazards framework, wherein settlement and adjudication are competing risks. The evidence found is consistent with the proposition that the speed with which patent litigation is resolved by either settlement or adjudication reflects the use of proprietary, defensive, and leveraging patent strategies by firms. These findings also help to explain unexpected and anomalous findings regarding the settlement of patent litigation reported in prior research.

In today’s economy, intangibles have become more important than physical assets for firm success. In particular, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) registered an increasing trend in patenting, exceeding large firms in the number of patent registrations. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between patents and SME sales performance, taking into consideration also patent quality.

The approach uses panel regression model to investigate the relationship between patenting and sales, controlling for firm size and firm age. The authors adopt a purposive sampling technique focusing on a sample of Italian SMEs in the mechanical industry.

The results show that the count of patents do not have any effect on sales performance, while the number of jurisdictions where the protection is extended produces a positive and significant result.

The main implication for SME entrepreneurs and managers is that relying on a large number of patents does not automatically lead to higher performance; instead, filing those patents which protect particularly valuable innovations could be more productive in terms of SME sales performance Moreover, the results suggest that a longer time lag between patent filing and SME sales performance might be possible.

This paper is one of first attempts to shed light on the issue regarding SMEs patent quality. It is notable that the quality of patents in terms of geographical scope is positively associated to SME sales performance.