Pre-empted patents, infringed patents and firms’ participation in markets for technology
Christoph Grimpe and
Katrin Hussinger
Research Policy, 2014, vol. 43, issue 3, 543-554
Abstract:
In recent years, firms have increasingly contributed to and been confronted with a patent landscape characterized by numerous but marginal inventions, overlapping claims and patent fences. As a result, firms risk their patent applications to be pre-empted or to be infringed upon by rivals. While both aspects constitute major challenges for the appropriation of returns to inventive activity, extant literature suggests that participation in the market for technology might actually resolve or at least alleviate these problems. In this paper, we investigate the effect of pre-empted and infringed patents on firms’ engagement in in- and cross-licensing. Based on a sample of more than 1100 German manufacturing firms our results show that firms engage in in-licensing as a reaction to pre-empted patents and in cross-licensing if their protected IP was infringed upon. However, these effects vary depending on the fragmentation of technology fields and whether the firm operates in a discrete or complex product industry.
Keywords: In-licensing; Cross-licensing; Pre-emption; Infringement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L24 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733313002205
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
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:eee:respol:v:43:y:2014:i:3:p:543-554
DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2013.12.001
Access Statistics for this article
Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray
More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().