Patent Quality Research Articles

Legal Characteristics of the Quality of Patents in the Sphere of Information Technologies: Statement of the Problem

Patents are an important element of economic growth that promotes innovation through the creation of new scientific and technological knowledge. The impact of patents on stimulating innovation and economic growth is undeniable. At the same time, the role of protecting the results of intellectual activity is emphasized in order to increase competitiveness and increase applications. As a result, the number of patents for applying new technologies and attracting new participants within the system (i.e. high-tech entities, research institutions, start-ups and networks) has grown exponentially, jeopardizing the future functioning of the patent system. Patents are still increasingly used by business entities and government research organizations to protect new inventions, IT solutions, technologies that generate new waves of innovation and contribute to changing the current national civil legislation of the Russian Federation.

Innovation beyond firm boundaries: Strategic alliances and corporate innovation

In this paper, we empirically analyze how strategic alliances affect the innovation output of the firms forming the alliance. We find a positive effect of R&D-related strategic alliances on corporate innovation, as measured by the quantity and quality of patents filed. This effect is stronger for firms led by CEOs with higher general managerial skills, firms with greater experience from earlier alliances, and firms operating in R&D-intensive industries. Furthermore, the innovation-fostering effect of strategic alliances is more pronounced if alliance partnering firms share a common institutional blockholder or have a higher degree of technological proximity. We also document, for the first time in the literature, a unique contractual mechanism through which firms share the benefits of innovation with their alliance partners, namely, “co-patenting.”

The Tech Cold War: What can we learn from the most dynamic patent classes?

This research assesses key aspects of the Tech Cold War between the World’s two largest economies, the US and China. We focused on the patenting performance in four most dynamic patent classes at both the EPO and the USPTO in the period from 2000 to 2019. The data shows that China has had a very fast catching up in terms of patent counts, and was ranked no lower than #5 in all of those patent classes, in both the EPO and the USPTO in 2019. However, an assessment of patent quality shows that a significant gap still remains between the Chinese firms and their counterparts in the US and in other most developed economies. Despite that qualitative disadvantage, the patent data that was analysed also indicates that the quantitative catching up has to a reasonable extent been based on endogenous R&D effort and learning dynamics, a finding which is confirmed by the weak involvement of the major Chinese firms in patent co-ownership networks in the overviewed patent classes. In the now unlikely scenario of no significant changes in the global competitive environment, including in the WTO and TRIPS rules, China becoming the global technological leader before the end of the 2020s would have been a possibility with a reasonable likelihood. However, the political economy of the Tech Cold War has made difficult any linear extrapolation of recent trends.

Current situation of acupuncture and moxibustion patents in China and abroad

The patents of acupuncture and moxibustion in China and abroad was analyzed, aiming to provide support for the innovative development of acupuncture industry. With the China Think Tank of Patent of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the PatSnap database as data sources, based on the mathematical statistics method, the application trend, legal status, patent types, transformation and distribution of major technical fields of acupuncture patents in China and abroad were analyzed. As a result, a total of 53,422 acupuncture patents were screened, involving 49 countries and 4 organizations. The patent types were mainly utility model patents. Although the application number of acupuncture patent had increased rapidly, the average patent conversion rate was generally low, approximately 4%. In the context of global economic integration, the acupuncture industry is developing at a high speed. It is suggested to take advantage of the "Belt and Road Initiative" to improve the international acceptance of acupuncture and moxibustion, adhere to the principle of attaching equal importance to the number and quality of patents, promote the in-depth cooperation of industry-university-research, and promote high-quality development of acupuncture and moxibustion.

The Impact of Intellectual Property Quality on Economic Development: Insights from Jiangsu Province

Aims: This paper gets rid of the limitation of patent quantity of intellectual property, strengthens people's protection on the quality of intellectual property, and makes people realize that intellectual property will eventually be transformed into productivity and have an impact on economic development.
 Study Design: The quality of intellectual property is measured through three dimensions: patent market (economic) quality, patent technology quality and patent law quality
 Methodology: Based on the essence of patent quality, this paper defines and divides the concept, evaluation system and research index of intellectual property quality, and analyzes the internal relationship and influence mechanism between intellectual property quality and economic development.
 Results: The quality of intellectual property is positively correlated with economic development.
 Conclusion: The research conclusion puts forward new requirements for the transformation efficiency of intellectual property in the technology market of Jiangsu Province. The ultimate destination of patent invention is to serve the society and promote productivity. It is not only necessary to pay attention to the protection of the "source" of intellectual property, but also to enhance the agglomeration effect of intellectual property in the "economic estuary". It is of great practical significance to realize both "quality" and "quantity" of intellectual property for strengthening the construction of intellectual property, perfecting intellectual property system and promoting economic development.

Productivity, Innovation Spillovers, and Mergers: Evidence from a Panel of U.S. Firms

Abstract We investigate the impact of mergers and product innovation on labour productivity through a unique panel data set of roughly 2000 publicly traded U.S. manufacturing firms from 1980 to 2003. OLS estimates reveal that mergers interacted with citation-weighted patents are significantly correlated with increases in labour productivity. OLS and IV estimates of citation-weighted patent stocks with respect to firm-specific labour productivity are positive and consistently significant. Further, mergers are significantly correlated with a rise in citation-weighted patent stocks and research and development (R&D) spending. In tandem, our findings suggest that larger firms resulting from mergers spend more on innovation, which results in higher quality patents, and increased labour productivity.

Formation of economic and legal measures for the development of the market of intellectual property objects

The problems of intellectual property market development have been investigated. It is proved that without the successful functioning of this market it is impossible to ensure the innovative development of the country. The characteristics of the intellectual property market, as well as the factors restraining its development, have been determined. The most important of them are significant volumes of outflow of Ukrainian scientists to foreign countries, low quality of Ukrainian patents, high level of counterfeiting and piracy, corruption pressure on the development and use of intellectual property, insufficient level of material support, etc. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop measures to strengthen the factors that contribute to the development of the intellectual property market and reduce the negative impact of factors on the Ukrainian technological market. To achieve the goal, it is proposed to introduce organizational and legal measures to improve the working conditions of employees of the main scientific institution of the country, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine, the institutes of which produce most intellectual developments, as well as to form special financial and material mechanisms to support innovation at the expense of budget funds. Using the example of reforming the institutes of NAS, according to the proposed measures, proposals have been formed to preserve scientific personnel, intensify the cooperation of scientific institutions with business, built on the interest of all parties in the field of technology commercialization. Counteraction to counterfeiting is proposed to be carried out taking into account a more accurate calculation of the commercial risks to which business entities are exposed in the manufacture and use of innovations. It is recommended to strengthen the level of legal protection of exclusive rights. Legislative initiatives on the development of the intellectual property market have been formed, which relate to changes in patent legislation regarding utility models and bringing it to EU conditions

Corporate Patenting, Customer Capital, and Financial Market Outcomes

AbstractWe study how patenting enhances customer capital and creates financial value in a product market characterized by information asymmetry between firm insiders and customers. We find that firms with more and higher quality patents develop greater customer capital, as measured by more positive customer perceptions of product novelty and quality. To establish causality, we exploit the exogenous variation in the random assignment of patent examiners to review applications and use the average examiner leniency as an instrument for patent grants. Our mediation analysis documents a positive impact of patenting on firm performance and financial market valuation through enhanced customer capital.

Chinese public university patents during 2006–20: a comprehensive investigation and comparative study

Abstract Promoting growth in patent activity was an important stated goal of China’s Medium- and Long-Term Plan for Science and Technology Development (2006–20), and it was a successful one. By the end of this ambitious blueprint, China had witnessed enormous growth in the number of granted patents, especially those granted to public universities. This vital role played by universities in technology innovation justifies further research on the role of academia with respect to the development of technology. However, most studies on patenting by Chinese universities are limited in terms of research scale and context, and patent performance is seldom investigated in great detail. This study first presents an overall analysis of the utility patents granted to Chinese public universities (not utility model patents). Then, we compare the patent performance of two elite university groups: Project 985 universities in China and member institutions of the Association of American Universities (AAU) in the USA. Our results show that Chinese universities account for a high proportion of the total patents granted in China, and the number of patents granted to universities has grown rapidly in recent decades, making them a very substantial contributor to China’s innovation system. However, the value of patents did not improve as their counts surged. Compared to AAU universities, the technological and economic value of patents held by Project 985 universities is considerably lower, even for the top-patenting universities in China. These findings extend our understanding of technological innovation activity in China’s academic landscape and might inspire future policies toward patent quality and impact.

Interpretable patent recommendation with knowledge graph and deep learning

Patent transfer is a common practice for companies to obtain competitive advantages. However, they encounter the difficulty of selecting suitable patents because the number of patents is increasingly large. Many patent recommendation methods have been proposed to ease the difficulty, but they ignore patent quality and cannot explain why certain patents are recommended. Patent quality and recommendation explanations affect companies’ decision-making in the patent transfer context. Failing to consider them in the recommendation process leads to less effective recommendation results. To fill these gaps, this paper proposes an interpretable patent recommendation method based on knowledge graph and deep learning. The proposed method organizes heterogeneous patent information as a knowledge graph. Then it extracts connectivity and quality features from the knowledge graph for pairs of patents and companies. The former features indicate the relevance of the pairs while the latter features reflect the quality of the patents. Based on the features, we design an interpretable recommendation model by combining a deep neural network with a relevance propagation technique. We conduct experiments with real-world data to evaluate the proposed method. Recommendation lists with varying lengths show that the average precision, recall, and mean average precision of the proposed method are 0.596, 0.636, and 0.584, which improve corresponding performance of best baselines by 7.28%, 18.35%, and 8.60%, respectively. Besides, our method interprets recommendation results by identifying important features leading to the results.

Micro green technology innovation effects of green finance pilot policy—From the perspectives of action points and green value

Prior literature on the green innovation effects of green finance policies is vast, but scholars have mostly focused on the quantity and quality of green innovation, with a bias in the policy action points analysis. Accordingly, this study explores the action points and green value of China's Green Finance Pilot Policy (GFPP) by analyzing the green behavior of listed industrial enterprises. The findings suggest that GFPP cannot improve the quality of green patents, but plays a strong role in improving the emerging degree of green technology and stimulates innovation activities in end-pollutant treatment and green process improvement. Furthermore, the green value investigation indicates that GFPP not only promotes technology diffusion and the ESG scores of industrial enterprises, but also reduces corporate carbon emission intensity. Overall, this study provides an important reference for the implementation of green finance policies to realize the green development of enterprises.

The impact of patent quality on corporate performance in the context of big data and the Internet of Things

In the context of big data and the Internet of Things, this article explores the impact of corporate patent quality on corporate performance through analysis of corporate patent quality. Starting from multiple influencing factors, measure the patent value of enterprises to promote the economic benefits. Focus on the analysis of the practical conversion capacity of patents and the impact on corporate performance, establish a mathematical evaluation model, and explore the specificity of the patent quality through the method of regression analysis. This article has studied the important role of patent technology to improve the efficiency of enterprises, and explores the overall level of corporate performance management on how to maximizes the overall level of corporate performance management. The system of measures for patent technology to promote performance development under the background of big data constructed by the research has a very good reference for the sustainable development of enterprises at the current stage. From the existing research results, there are problems such as too few analysis samples and slow data updates, and these problems have been better solved in this study. The research analyzes the comprehensive impact of patent quality on enterprises through big data, highlights the positive relationship between patent quality and enterprise performance, and effectively fills the gap in current research.

Do new CEOs really care about innovation?

AbstractThis study asks whether new chief executive officers (CEOs) care about innovation postturnover. Using a large sample of Chinese listed firms between 2008 and 2019, our identification strategy relies on the exogenous variation in CEO turnovers. Our difference‐in‐difference estimates indicate that new CEOs improve R&D efficiency and generate more and higher quality patents. We further show that this positive effect is more pronounced when CEOs have longer career horizons and overseas experience. Overall, our findings indicate that CEO turnover represents an effective mechanism for fostering innovation and new CEOs indeed care about innovation. Our results could benefit several groups of stakeholders with respect to CEO selection process.

Effects of co-patenting across national boundaries on patent quality. An exploration in pharmaceuticals

ABSTRACT This paper explores three novel research questions. First, is an increase in the number of countries involved in ownership of a co-patent an effective way to enhance patent quality? Second, if the objective is to raise patent quality, which are the right countries to collaborate with? And third, does cooperation with partners located in a tax haven affect patent quality? The empirical methodology relies on forward citations as an indicator of quality, and patent co-ownership as a measure of international collaboration. Our econometric findings show that, first, the average effect of international collaboration is a 4.9% increase in patent quality compared with those patents for which the assignees come from a single country (once we controlled for patent characteristics). When the number of countries in which the assignees are based increases, the effect of this wider collaboration on patent quality is also greater, though only for up to a maximum of five countries. Second, to produce patents of better quality, the most suitable countries with which to collaborate were found to be the United States, Switzerland, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom. Finally, collaboration with firms located in a country categorized as a tax haven does not have any significant impact on patent quality.

Option‐implied information and quality of patents

AbstractThis research explores how option‐implied information predicts quality of patents. Using several measures of option‐implied information, we find that only the option to stock volume (O/S) ratio positively and significantly predicts quality of patents around patent grant announcements. The findings are not entirely driven by information from the stock market and the probability of informed trading. Further investigations show that the predictability of O/S on patent quality is stronger when market sentiment is high, firms have a higher short‐sale cost, and the quality of patents is relatively high.

Analysis of patent mortality rate across different technology fields in India

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to evaluate how indicators of patent quality affect the value of a patent, which can be measured by how often it is renewed (or “survives”). Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are becoming more important in a wide range of industries. In the same way, a country's intellectual strength can be judged by how many patents it has and how much research and development it does. The Cox-PH model and the accelerated failure time (AFT) model are used in this study to determine the patent's worth across the five major technology groups and ownership status. The final sample for survival analysis is made up of 40132 patents that were obtained from the Indian Patent Office between 1995 and 2005. (IPO). We find that broad academic patents don't last longer, but that the patent's ability to be used internationally makes it last longer. In contrast, institutional patents are geographically restricted. The collaboration appears to have a greater impact on patent value.

Patent Quality Literature Review

Patent quality is an early concept. At present, many researches on patent quality have been carried out. This paper combs the research on patent quality, and analyzes the views of relevant research to promote the research on patent quality. In this paper, the concept, measurement index and related research of patent quality are reviewed by literature analysis. Compared with defining patent quality, existing researches prefer to analyze the evaluation indicators of patent quality. The measurement of patent quality can be roughly divided into two categories: using a single indicator and using multiple indicators to build a comprehensive evaluation index. At present, there are more and more researches on patent quality in China, but they are obviously behind other countries. It has become the trend of patent quality research in China to study the evaluation indicators of patent quality and use them in empirical analysis.

Research on Correlation Control of Subjective Patent Indicators Based on Progressive Constraint

Patent indicator evaluation is a relatively objective patent quality evaluation method recognized by academia. Some subjective patent indicators are often related, which to some extent interferes with the objectivity of patent evaluation. This study selects five commonly used subjective patent indicators that are directly related to the compilers of patent documents, which includes patent forward citations, patent family, four digit international patent classifications, patentees, and patent inventors. Through the progressive limitation of the three constraints of patentees, patent priority countries, and patent disclosure years, the correlation between the subjective patent indicators is compared. The research results show that under the control of progressive constraint conditions, the positive correlation between subjective patent indicators is increasingly strengthened as a whole and has strong controllability. Further verification shows that the direct compilers of patent documents can affect the results of patent indicator evaluation by controlling the subjective patent indicator data, thus interfering with the evaluation of patent quality. It is recommended that researchers carefully select multiple subjective patent indicators with strong correlation before using patent indicators to evaluate patent quality, and complete the correlation analysis and screening of subjective patent indicators in advance.

Original but of low value: the paradox of science-industry collaborative patents

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of science-industry collaborative patents filed between 1978 and 2015 (granted up to 2020) at the European Patent Office (EPO) in four major European countries (Germany, France, Italy, and the UK) and in the US.We focus on three dimensions regarding patent quality: the knowledge base, the technological impact, and the economic value. Our findings reveal that, on average, science-industry collaborative patents demonstrate higher levels of sophistication and originality than other industry patents. However, they tend to have a similar impact and, depending on the measures considered, an economic value that is either comparable or lower. Furthermore, if we look at the experience of private companies when collaborating with academic institutions, we observe that more experienced collaborations tend to yield patents that are slightly less sophisticated and impactful, but which possess higher economic value. We discuss various potential explanations for these findings and their implications for future research.JEL classification: O31, O34.

Effect of Economic and Technological Development Zones on Green Innovation

Green innovation is an effective way of solving the dilemma of the economy–environment trade-off. As an important innovation policy in China, national economic and technological development zones (NETDZs) play a significant role in promoting innovation, but empirical studies on their impact on innovation, especially green innovation, are scarce. In this study, the authors used highly disaggregated micro-level data such as patent data, industrial firm data, and customs data to examine the impact of NETDZs on green innovation. The results showed that: (1) NETDZs significantly promote green innovation, as measured by both patent quantity and patent quality; (2) the binding environmental indicators in China's five-year plan enhance the promotional effect of NETDZs on green innovation; (3) learning by importing, including through foreign direct investment and importing capital goods, is an important mechanism for the nexus between NETDZs and green innovation; and (4) compared with non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), SOEs are relatively passive in terms of engaging in learning by importing.