Patent Thickets, Licensing and Innovative Performance

Elisabeth Müller, Megan MacGarvie and Iain Cockburn
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Elisabeth Mueller

No 08-101, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We examine the relationship between fragmented intellectual property (IP) rights and innovative performance, taking into consideration the role played by in-licensing of IP. Controlling for a variety of firm and market characteristics, we find that firms facing more fragmented IP landscapes are more likely to report expenditures on in-licensing and for those firms that do incur license costs we find a weak positive association between licensing expenditure and fragmented IP rights in the relevant technology. We also observe a negative relationship between IP fragmentation and innovative performance, but only for firms that engage in in-licensing and only for product innovation. The relationship between fragmentation and innovative performance also depends on the size of a firm's patent portfolio, which suggests an important strategic role for defensive patenting in the context of fragmented property rights.

Keywords: patent thickets; licensing; innovative performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-knm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/27583/1/dp08101.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Patent thickets, licensing and innovative performance (2010)
Working Paper: Patent thickets, licensing and innovative performance (2009)
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:zewdip:7475

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().