Previous studies on the relationship between patent acquisition and firm performance usually focus on the effect of static indicators including application number and valid number on performance. While, in practice, patent acquisition is a dynamic strategic process co-determined by two crucial decisions: application and renewal. Firms show heterogeneity not only on the volume indicators such as application number and abandonment number, also on the dynamic feature including velocity of application and abandonment. It is necessary to assess the effect of patent acquisition from a dynamic and holistic view. This study will try to fill this research gap by evaluating the results of the general and changing patent acquisition strategy.
In order to operationalize the velocity of patent acquisition, we introduce two concepts, application rate and abandonment rate. The higher of the rate, the more aggressive the acquisition strategy is. Firstly, we propose that application rate is positive related to performance since active application might come with new competitive advantage. Secondly, abandonment leads to sunk cost and the termination of value creating of certain patents, so we also propose a negative interaction effect of application rate and abandonment rate to integrate the effect of these decisions. Lastly, we try to examine how different acquisition strategy match with other factors of firm. We propose the moderating effect of firm technology strategy, strategic change and organizational slack on the relationship between acquisition strategy and performance respectively.
To test the above hypotheses, we collect data from 1983 public listed companies during 1992 to 2017. The patent number of all these firms in the observation period is 717,419, while we only keep 179,154 invention patents, since invention patents are more innovative and strategic than the other two types of patents. The final firm-year observation used in estimation is 10,501. The OLS regression is selected as the estimation strategy based the panel data set fixed effect. Multicollinearity and heteroscedasticity problems are addressed as well. We also provide robustness test by replacing dependent variable and examining the interaction effect by three interaction items instead of sample splitting.
Based on the empirical results of data, we find that vigorous applications have a positive impact on performance, and simultaneously aggressive abandonment does not necessarily lead to poor performance, which does not support hypothesis. While, the moderating effect results further indicate that negative interaction effect between these two decisions occurs when companies undergo strategic changes or maintain low organizational slack. Also, the interaction effect is positive when firm implement a diversified technology strategy. These findings show that the effect of acquisition strategy on performance is dependent on the three moderating variables, and aggressive acquisition might work in certain situations.
This study makes several contributions to the literature. First, this research evaluates patent decisions from a dynamic perspective, by introducing the definition and measurement of the aggressiveness of acquisition strategy. Second, this study supplements the patent strategy theory through the integration of application and renewal decision-making. An important contribution of this research is to theoretically integrate the two strategies of application and renewal into the framework of the acquisition strategy, and empirically test the joint impact of these two strategies on corporate performance. Third, this study enriches the theory of patent strategy by testing the applicability of acquisition strategy. We examine the contextual factors from three aspects: the concentration of technology strategy, the stability of overall strategy and the abundance of organizational slack, thus extending the theoretical understanding of the application boundary of patent strategy theory.
This study also offers some practical implications for firms to formulate and implement patent strategies, and then give full play to the strategic benefits of patents. Resource investment is required for each stage of patent R&D, application, maintenance and commercialization. Therefore, the strategy of applying and maintaining patents as much as possible in reality is not applicable to all enterprises. Only by controlling the operating cost of the patent right portfolio within the resource constraints of the enterprise and meeting the strategic needs of the enterprise can the maximum benefit be obtained through the lowest cost. The conclusion of this study points out that when a company implements diversified technology strategy, is in a period of strategic stability, or has organizational slack, a radical patent acquisition strategy is more effective.
Key words
patent acquisition strategy /
firm performance /
technology strategy /
strategic change /
organizational slack
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