Intellectual property protection and standardization

This paper presents the first attempt at analyzing the relationship between strategies to protect intellectual porperty rights and their impact on the likelihood of joining formal standardization processes, based on a small sample of European companies. On the one hand, theory suggests that the stronger the protection of one's own technological know-how, the higher the likelihood to join formal standardization processes in order to leverage the value of the technological portfolio. On the other hand, companies at the leading edge are often in such a strong position that they do not need the support of standards to market their products successfully. The results of the statistical analysis show that the higher the patent intensities of companies, the lower their tendency to join standardization processes, supporting the latter theoretical hypothesis.