How does knowledge matter patenting inventions?

Ana Pérez-Luño and Ramón Valle-Cabrera ()
Additional contact information
Ramón Valle-Cabrera: Department of Business Administration, Universidad Pablo de Olavide

No 10.01, Working Papers from Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Department of Business Administration

Abstract: While there is robust empirical evidence that firm patenting is positively associated with various measures of overall performance and competitiveness, less is known about what determines the patenting choice. For this reason, this paper examines whether R&D expenditure and the type of knowledge used in the invention determine the decision to patent. With this aim, we use a sample of firms and the European Patent Office to analyse how the combination of R&D expenditure and knowledge codifiability, observability and simplicity influences the patent decision. Our results contribute to the literature and assist R&D managers by showing that both R&D and codified knowledge have a positive impact on the number of inventions patented by a firm, while observable knowledge has a negative impact on patents. Furthermore, we find that the effect of R&D expenditure on the propensity to patent inventions is negatively moderated by knowledge observability and simplicity.

Keywords: : R&D; patents; knowledge; invent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2010-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.upo.es/serv/bib/wpbsad/bsad1001.pdf First version, 2010 (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:pab:wpbsad:10.01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Department of Business Administration Carretera de Utrera km.1, 41013 Sevilla. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publicación Digital - UPO ().