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In the intellectual property (IP) and management literature, the question of how external patent attorneys impact patent filings has been understudied. The purpose of this paper is to advance this area of research by examining how the use of external patent attorneys influences the patent filing strategies of firms and what impact firms’ level of experience with the exclusive use of in-house resources has on filing strategies. This study, thus, provides insights into the strategic dimension behind patent filing, a process which is affected by patent attorneys’ work and decision-making processes.

The econometric analysis is based on a patent database of 922,553 patents which is combined with an EPO patent database covering applications from 1990 to 2010. The authors test the hypotheses for this study using patent indicators addressing the impact of in-house firm experience vs the use of external patent attorneys on firm’s filing strategy.

This research finds empirical evidence that external patent attorneys’ work has an effect on patent scope, international scope, and patenting speed. Moreover, it can be shown that external patent attorneys have a positive impact on most filing dimensions, such as patent scope, international scope and the Patent Cooperation Treaty option, whereas the level of in-house firm experience has a negative impact on most filing dimensions. This implies that external patent attorneys seem to pursue a “maximization approach” while experienced firms seem to pursue a more differentiated approach to filing patents, for instance, drafting narrower and more focused patents.

The study suggests that effective filing strategies require an integrated approach between diverse IP stakeholders. More particularly, filing strategies should be communicated and aligned between all actors, including external patent attorneys in order to achieve the targeted patenting output.

The current study develops a patent filing typology, which accounts for patent attorneys’ decision options. In providing insights into patent attorneys’ work and their impacts on intellectual property rights management, the study is a useful complement to prior research, which has predominantly focused on applicants or examiners.

Understanding a technology’s patent landscape, including patent strategies, helps organizations position themselves regarding their innovation and provides insight about a technology’s future direction. This study aims to provide an overview of the blockchain technology patenting trends and outlines an exploratory framework of patenting strategies for blockchain.

A total of 3,234 registered patents are analyzed to determine the geographical distribution and identify key actors patenting around the globe. In addition, an empirical study consisting of multiple case studies in the form of ten in-depth interviews with owners/managers of organizations based in North America was conducted to understand organizations’ strategies for patenting the blockchain technology.

Several novel insights regarding the strategies are used for blockchain technology patenting. For example, the existence of strong anti-patent sentiment which results in a lack of patenting by start-up organizations or has led to a form of open source patenting strategy. Larger organizations appear to be patenting defensively, and small to medium organizations are primarily patenting to defend their competitive advantage.

Start-up organizations harboring anti-patent sentiment should consider the open-source patenting strategy to ensure that the collaborative innovation network can continue. They should also consider collaborating with other actors within the network to have a competitive position in the market.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to conduct an empirical study with organizations currently using the blockchain technology to understand patenting strategies used for blockchain.

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.

This paper aims to develop a systematic framework of strategy of designing around existing patents in enterprises' innovative activities. After reviewing the choice of strategy and principle of the design to evade the existing patents, this paper discusses how to select the target patent under enterprise's strategy, before finally taking the designing around existing patent based on patent standardisation as an successful implementation of innovative process.

This is an exploratory research with a case study of critical technology of OTFT to illustrate the application of the proposed strategy. The choice of strategy of designing around existing patents is analyzed on the basis of judgments of patent infringement, and a framework of selecting target patent is proposed for the development of strategy of designing around existing patents as an innovation process.

This research suggests that technology innovation based on designing around existing patent should focus on choosing technology from the target patent of critical technology, choosing a policy that can balance the risk of patent infringement and costs of technology innovation and combining the policy of designing around existing patent and the application of TRIZ theory.

The framework proposed in this paper provides an alternative strategy of technological innovation for technology follower firms.

The purpose of this article is twofold; to verify the existence of different profiles of firms based on the level of sophistication of their patent management core processes and to test the impact of the interplay between two patent management supporting dimensions, namely patent strategy and organization for patenting, on the level of sophistication of patent management core processes.

The method consists of a survey study, collecting data from a set of European patent management professionals. These data are analyzed with factor analysis, cluster analysis and regression analysis to test several hypotheses.

The results show that patent strategy positively and significantly impacts patent management sophistication, and that the patent organization positively moderates this relationship. In other words, a patent strategy, supported by a well-developed patent organization and culture, will positively influence the processes of managing a firm's patent portfolio.

This study is, to the authors’ knowledge, the first one to provide quantitative evidence that supports the notion that it is important to take a strategic and organizational perspective of patent management.

Several causes may induce firm managers to analyze the actual technology condition of patent portfolios, among which is the need of exploiting patents strategically. In this paper, the question of how to support intellectual property (IP) managers of large high technology companies in their strategic decision-making process of evaluating patents is examined. The purpose of this paper is to provide a decision support framework that suggests the suitable exploitation strategy for patents.

The paper proposes an audit framework able to point out whether patents are aligned to the overall business strategy, to select those that are not aligned, and to identify the most appropriate exploitation strategy for each patent of the portfolio. The framework is structured into two phases: in the first one, patents are selected through the analysis of four dimensions that characterize the value of patents effectively; in the second one, a questionnaire is distributed to IP managers in order to support their decision on patents. The paper illustrates case-based applications of the framework.

Results of applications show that the framework is able to suggest IP managers the suitable exploitation strategy on four possible alternatives (maintaining, licensing, selling, abandoning) for each patent of their portfolios.

The framework is an innovative and valuable tool to IP managers, and besides its structural formulation, it is appreciable in terms of application expedition and efficiency of performance.

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 paper aims to study how global pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer have managed the challenges of pharmaceutical patent expiry.

A case study method was applied. The best-selling brand drug over the past 10 years – Lipitor – was chosen as the case target.

For dealing with this, this paper describes all the details of the corresponding strategies of Pfizer before and after patent expiration of Lipitor. Before patent expiry, Pfizer undertook the activities of direct-to-consumer marketing, pricing strategy for competition, legal delay and me-too drug R&D. After patent expiry, Pfizer chose to carry out continuous marketing for brand, rebate strategy, authorized generics and change to over-the-counter. In addition, diversity and globalization strategy was applied before and after patent expiry.

This research provides strong implication for managing pharmaceutical products before and after patent expiry.

It is strongly recommended for both brand and generic drug companies to design strategies to meet the challenges of pharmaceutical patent expiry.

For the global pharmaceutical market, a conclusion can be drawn that, nowadays, the “patent cliff” is the most significant factor influencing decision-makers to consider futuristic policies. Further, it is also a considerably effective solution for reducing health-care costs for policymakers.

This paper contributes to the field of patent expiry management in high-tech industries such as pharmaceuticals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine, for a sample of ten corporations in three industries (i.e. automotive suppliers, semiconductors, and computer networks), the different strategies that firms undertake when acquiring patent-protected technologies. In particular, the authors analyze and compare two alternative channels for patent acquisition: markets for technology (MFT) and merger and acquisition (M&A) processes.

The authors implement two types of analyses, at both patent and firm level. First, the authors perform an econometric analysis to evaluate whether acquired patented technologies differ in their patent bibliographic characteristics with respect to patent-protected technologies that have been developed internally by the examined firms. The authors then investigate the presence of differences in the characteristics of transacted patents acquired in the MFT or by means of M&A activities. Second, the authors take a firm-level perspective and examine the technology acquisition strategies adopted by selected companies to identify the presence of common patterns, industry-driven specificities and firm peculiarities.

The authors find that acquired patented technologies are, on average, more complex, of higher technical merit and the corresponding patents show a higher legal robustness. Econometric results reveal the presence of differences between M&A and MFT patents: the latter seem to protect less complex, and thus easier to trade, inventions. The analysis of the patterns of patent acquisitions at the firm level shows the presence of different strategies for the external sourcing of patented technologies, based on whether acquired patents protect core or non-core technology areas of the analyzed firms. Such patterns are discussed in the light of the different streams of the literature on intellectual property (IP) management.

This paper makes use of a new and comprehensive data set of the US patent transactions that took place between 2002 and 2010. The authors added detailed data on the evolution of the corporate trees of analyzed firms. The paper contributes to the literature on technology acquisitions and MFT by examining the different channels for patented technology acquisitions. The issue represents an emerging area of interest in the field of IP management.

Firms may suffer differently from the patent thickets in a particular technology field. This paper explores how patent thickets affect the financial performance of firms with different patent propensities and technological leadership.

From the perspective of patent strategy, the authors study how patent propensity, the possibility that a firm applies for patents, affects the patent thickets and financial performance. Additionally, this paper uses patent stock to measure technological leadership, the degree to which a firm can develop, maintain and enhance technology and product innovation, to study the impact of patent propensity on firms. A three-way interaction model is used to explore the relationship among patent thickets, patent propensity, technological leadership and financial performance based on an unbalanced panel of 69 Chinese telecommunication equipment firms from 2008 to 2019.

The authors find that patent propensity positively moderates patent thickets and financial performance. Notably, technological leadership negatively moderates the moderating effect of patent propensity.

This paper enriches the heterogeneous literature of patent thickets and financial performance. It sheds light on the fact that firms with different technological leadership may use different patent strategies to cut through patent thickets.