Formal vs. informal protection instruments and the strategic use of patents in an Expected-Utility framework

Peter Neuhäusler

No 20, Discussion Papers "Innovation Systems and Policy Analysis" from Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI)

Abstract: The present article examines the question whether or not different types of firms tend to protect their innovations with varying mechanisms. Against the background of the Expected-Utility Theory (EU-Theory), firms are differentiated by their size, technological field and their degree of internationalization. According to the EU-Theory modelling, it is hypothesized that large, high-tech and strongly internationalized firms show a stronger tendency to use formal instruments, e.g. patents, to protect their innovations, whereas small and medium-sized (SME), low-tech and weakly internationalized companies fol-low the strategy of protecting their innovations with informal instruments, e.g. secrecy, to maximize their expected utility. A twofold approach is followed to analyze the theoretical model. For the empirical testing a large-scale survey about 540 records of patenting companies in Germany is used. Differences in attitudes towards protection mechanisms and differences in the actual IPR-management behavior between firms are analyzed. The results show that the attitudes towards protecting innovative achievements only differ slightly by firm type. Large differences can be revealed on the behavioral level which, together with other findings, leads to the conclusion that mostly SMEs are forced to use certain protection mechanisms to keep pace with large companies and technological precursors in fast growing markets.

Keywords: patents; secrecy; expected utility; Intellectual property; rational choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/28542/1/611979659.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:fisidp:20

DOI: 10.24406/publica-fhg-294421

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers "Innovation Systems and Policy Analysis" from Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().