Patent-Enhancing Strategies by Industry in Korea Using a Data Envelopment Analysis

Bangrae Lee,Han-Joon Kim,Dongkyu Won,Leenam Kwon,Jun-Hwan Park,Young-Ho Moon

doi:10.3390/su8090901

Abstract

Global competition has increased the importance of patents as a means to protect and strengthen technology and competitiveness. The purposes of our study were to identify what industries in South Korea are strong or weak in terms of patent applications and to identify some strategies to enable weak industries to become strong. For this, we gathered statistics on seven variables as follows: number of businesses, number of employees, research and development investment, number of full-time equivalent researchers, number of research institutions, domestic market size, and number of patent applications. Especially, to compare the ratio of patent applications and the ratio of domestic market size across industries, the industries were classified into the following three categories: strong-, weak-, and no-patent. Furthermore, data envelopment analysis (DEA) suggested some strategies to strengthen patent applications for each industry. In the DEA analysis, the number of patent applications was used as the output variable and the other six variables were used as input variables. Our study will particularly assist industries where protection by patents is an important aspect of their businesses.

Highlights

Under the stimulus of AlphaGo, Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence program and IBM’s Watson, a question-answering computer system, the “fourth industrial revolution” has become of great interest to the South Korean government and industry sectors
The analysis showed that the strong, weak, and no-patent industries divided the Korean domestic market size by 29.3%, 33.0%, and 37.7%, respectively
The representative strong-patent industry includes the pharmaceutical or medical one. It implies that those industries are research and development (R&D)-intensive, while their domestic market sizes are smaller than other examples of well-developed industries in South Korea

Summary

Introduction

Under the stimulus of AlphaGo, Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence program and IBM’s Watson, a question-answering computer system, the “fourth industrial revolution” has become of great interest to the South Korean government and industry sectors. For South Korea, it represents a strategic breakthrough due to its manufacturing industry-leading, export-oriented, economic structure. In this context, we have an interest in developing strategic ways to strengthen South Korea’s industrial output. Many governments and global companies strive for sustainable growth and improved global competitiveness in a rapidly changing business environment [1]. South Korea’s government is faced with a difficult situation due to the increasing number of elderly people and challenges to tax revenues caused by recession. A new approach is needed for sustainable growth and enhanced competitiveness in the scenario of available resources. The “open innovation” concept, introduced by Chesbrough [3], has received much attention [4,5,6,7,8,9]; this concept, in short, refers to the use of outer as well as inner knowledge to improve internal innovation

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Discussion

Conclusion