Strategic Patent Management -- A Survey Among Inventors

Abstract

The contribution of this paper is to prepare and provide empirical evidence for the findings by Henkel and Jell (2009) on behavioral patterns and the corresponding motives of inventors during the patenting process at the German Patent and Trademark Office (GPTO).Based on the conservative literature the patenting system has two main objectives – incentive to innovate and diffusion of knowledge (Kaufer 2002). Innovators need to be incentivized in order to innovate. Therefore, innovators should profit from inventing and innovating. Under this directive they should be able to receive a certain amount of value the invention is able to generate. Thus, the patent system is one mechanism to assure these rents referring to the objective “incentive to innovate”. In contrast, the patenting system could have negative impacts, since the invention is published with the patent (“diffusion of knowledge”) which might enable competitors to imitate or invent around the original invention (Horstmann, et al. 1985) (Johnson and Popp 2003) (Anton and Yao 2004). Nevertheless, the patent system might be a valuable candidate for inventors to appropriate rents for the following reason. The incentivizing objective is supposed to be achieved by granting the inventor an exclusion right which excludes potential competitors from using the invention. Such an exclusion right is often stated as precondition to incentivize an inventor to innovate (Arrow 1962). In reality, the importance of excludability achieved by a patent is uniformly found to be less effective compared to aspects like lead time advantages and complementary assets (Teece 1986). (Levin, et al. 1987) (Harabi 1995) (Cohen, et al. 2000) (Arundel 2001) (Kaufer 2002) (Sattler 2003).Nevertheless, the number of patents and patent applications increases and scientist try to explain why companies still patent en masse. They found and analyzed certain “strategic” aspects of patents and patent applications that expand the conventional objectives of a patent. (Kash and Kingston 2001) (Granstrand 2001) (Arundel and Pattel 2003) (Macdonald 2004) (Blind, et al. 2006) (Blind, et al. 2009).These strategic motives can be summarized as “Blocking competitors”, “Enabling cross-licensing” and “Forearming against infringement suits”. (Cohen, et al. 2000)