Abstract: The contradiction between the ineffectiveness of patent monopolizing innovation profit and the high increasing of patent quantity causes the discussion on the motives for enterprise patent protection. The research background of motives for patent protection and empirical results in recently 10 years are reviewed, the evolvement of the motives for patent protection and main influence factors are summarized and analyzed. These researches consistently show that the importance of traditional patent protection motive derived from technology requirement has decreased, but the driving strength to the patent of strategy competition and cooperation becomes increasingly important. Moreover, the motives for patent protection are affected by enterprise exterior factors e.g. industry, nation, and enterprise interior factors such as size, innovation type, competition intensity, and R&D intensity. At last, it is presented that in the future, the empirical research on the motives for patent protection in Chinese enterprises should be focus on. Key words: patent protection; motive; innovation