مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Society profits from innovation, which is a “process initiated by the perception of a new market and/or new service opportunity for a technology-based invention which leads to development, production, and marketing tasks striving for the commercial success of the invention” (Garcia and Calantone, 2002, p. 112). In turn, regulators grant inventors a legally secured competitive advantage for a limited time period that protects quasi-monopolistic rents (Andries and Faems, 2013; Encaoua et al., 2006). From this perspective, it is irrelevant whether the patenting firm directly leverages this competitive advantage economically by transforming it into a market offer, or indirectly by licensing. In both cases, patents should contribute positively to firm performance. However, empirical findings on patents’ contribution to firm performance are mixed. Some studies find that patents have a positive impact on firm performance (Ernst, 2001; Mann and Sager, 2007; Helmers and Rogers, 2011), while others only find such an effect in specific cases (Mansfield, 1986; Arora et al., 2003), or do not identify a significant impact at all (Griliches et al., 1991; Artz et al., 2010; Suh and Hwang, 2010).

We argue that the ambiguous empirical picture of patents’ contribution to the inventing firm’s performance is rooted in previous studies not having sufficiently accounted for two pre-conditions for tapping this question: First, only if there are competing innovations in the same area as the patent, does legal protection become relevant and may the patent impact the inventing firm’s performance. In settings without such innovation competition, there is no danger of imitation and the patent remains economically irrelevant. Second, a patent application process’s disclosure of a patent’s details enables competitors to eliminate the inventors’ competitive advantage by pursuing circumvention strategies (Levin et al., 1987). The patent’s age is therefore relevant and patenting firms have to quickly tap the potential competitive advantage that patents create.

We take the above two pre-conditions–innovation competition and patent age -into account in this study to shed more light on patents’ performance impact. More specifically, we investigate how the number of patents granted to a firm in one period (2004– ۲۰۰۸) impacts its performance in the following period (2009– ۲۰۱۳), taking the moderating effect of (1) the innovation competition that the firm faced in the area in which the patent was granted, and (2) the patent’s age into account.