Abstract
Technology standards are considered important tools for increasing bargaining power and licensing revenues by combining the strategies of firms with the standard-setting organizations (SSOs) standardization processes. The essential patents declared by members of the SSOs play a critical role in such standardization processes. Some former researchers have found that, when using network analysis for measuring the knowledge positions in the “main-path” of standards-based markets, the essential patents did not match very well with the actual knowledge positions of the firms, in most cases. In this paper, we focus on the essential patents declared by the member firms in JTC1, an SSO that provides a standards development environment related to the development of the worldwide information and communication technology (ICT) standards for business and consumer applications, and that employs social network analysis techniques to investigate the knowledge positions of the patents, not only in the “main-path” discussed in the earlier literature, but also in the brokerage processes. We found that the brokerage-process approach helped us to better understand the roles of the essential patents that dominate transactions, relations, and the exchange of knowledge in the patent citation network than that of the main-path. Our findings suggest that claiming essentiality depends on the strategic behavior not only of the patents’ owners, but also of the SSOs.
Highlights
By using a social network analysis on the patent citation network related to the 3G W-CDMA standard, they proposed an alternative indicator, i.e., a “main-path”, to investigate the knowledge positions of the standard essential patent (SEP) in the patent citation network, where they assumed that the main-path is an accurate description of the importance of the knowledge position in the patent citation network, and that most of the patents on this main-path should be claimed essential to the standard
As data are most constrained for standard-essential patents, we collected our data for standard essential patents from the Disclosed Standard Essential Patents Database, developed by Bekkers et al, (2012) [17]
We believe that being able to assess the knowledge positions is important because they are assumed to increase the chances for sustainable market participation, bargaining power, and licensing revenues
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. By using a social network analysis on the patent citation network related to the 3G W-CDMA standard, they proposed an alternative indicator, i.e., a “main-path”, to investigate the knowledge positions of the SEPs in the patent citation network, where they assumed that the main-path is an accurate description of the importance of the knowledge position in the patent citation network, and that most of the patents on this main-path should be claimed essential to the standard. As indicated in Bekkers and Martinelli (2012) [9], the granularity of this method might restrict its usability in this context: even if the full network comprises thousands, or even ten thousand patents, the identified main-path of knowledge is often comprised of a few dozen patents, or even less This “over selective” problem may result in serious limitations and lead to a misunderstanding of the knowledge positions of the SEPs. On the other hand, Gould and Fernandez (1989) [16] propose a knowledge broker typology framework. The paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, we describe our dataset; in Section 3, we discuss the social network analysis on the patent citation network; in Section 4, we provide the regression results for the determinants of the declaration of the SEPs; and Section 5 concludes
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