How SMEs exploit their intellectual property asset

Authors: Gaétan de Rassenfosse

Publish Date: 2011/01/13

Volume: 39, Issue: 2, Pages: 437-452

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Abstract

This paper seeks to understand how motives to patent affect the use of the patent portfolio with a particular focus on motives aimed at the monetization of intellectual property The analysis relies on data from an international survey conducted by the European Patent Office There are three main results First small and mediumsized enterprises SMEs exhibit a much stronger reliance on ‘monetary patents’ than large companies and nearly half of the SMEs in the sample patent for monetary reasons Second SMEs tend to use their patents more actively than large firms Third smaller companies generally have a higher proportion of their portfolio that is licensed but the licensing rate is significantly higher in the USA An American SME is twice as likely as a European SME to have a high share of its portfolio that is actually licensed witnessing a fragmented market for technology in EuropeThis paper has received the 2008 CeFiP Academic Award ‘for contributing to the research on SME financing’ The author is grateful to Peter Hingley for having provided access to the data Jérôme Danguy Timo Fischer and two anonymous referees provided valuable comments The research was conducted when the author was affiliated at the Université libre de Bruxelles Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management ECARES Financial support from the Belgian national science foundation FRSFNRS is gratefully acknowledgedThere are 772 observations in the initial dataset but the working sample is limited to 392 applicants 94 SMEs + 298 large companies The reduction in the number of observations comes from various missing data Information on the use of the patent portfolio is missing for 331 applicants Among the 441 remaining observations information on the motivations to patent is missing for nine firms and 14 firms did not report the number of priority filings PF in 2005 Among the 418 applicants that remain 26 applicants that are nonprivate entities such as government laboratories or universities were excluded The final dataset was 392 firmsOne can test whether the missing information results in a selection bias in terms of company size and geographic origin The number of PF in 2005 is observed for a majority of applicants 744 of 772 and information is available on the geographic origin of all the applicants Approximately 50 of the applicants in the initial sample come from the EU27 23 come from the USA and 14 come from Japan The remaining 13 come from countries as diverse as Australia Canada or Israel

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