Options
2008
Conference Paper
Titel
The influence of companies' patenting motives on their standardisation strategy
Abstract
The protection of intellectual property (IPR) has several implications for the decision to join a formal or informal standard setting body. We start our analysis based on the model of forum shopping developed by Lerner and Tirole (2006) and modify it in order to take differences in IPR rules of stadrds setting bodies, companies' IPR protection strategies and patenting motives into account. Based on a sample of more than 500 German companies responsible for more than 40% of German applications at he European Patent Office, we are able to test first whether patent intensity of those involved in formal or informal standardisation is different from those not involved in or familiar with standardisation processes. The results of our regression analyses controlled for several variables like sector or company size show that companies involved in formal standardisationhave lower patent intensity, weheas those engaged in informal consortia standardisation are characterised by a higher patent intensity compared to htose not involved in standardisation at all. In a second step, we investigate whether various motives to paten (Blind et all 2006) have implications for the likelihood to join formal or informal standardisation processes. Especially companies with "collaborative" patenting strategies are more likely to join informal standardisation processes, whereas companies using patents to block competitors are more likely to join formal standardisation strategy. These results underline again the challenges for the formal standardisation bodies from the perspectve of companies' IPR and therefore also innovation strategies. Furthermore, the new insights provide new challenges for policy makers, who should reconsider the balance and the coordination between standardisation and IPR policies.
Konferenz