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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.

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.