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The management of intellectual property (IP) – particularly in the form of patents – has become of increasing importance to technology-oriented small and mid-sized businesses. Such companies adopt diverse strategies to develop and exploit knowledge as they move along innovation pathways from research and development (R&D) to technology commercialization. This investigation examines IP submissions through recent patents in the field of nanotechnology to better understand those strategies and focuses on how indicators of R&D activity, collaborations, funding and firm characteristics can be used to garner strategic and competitive intelligence about the orientations and IP strategies of technology-based firms. Our analysis of data from the Georgia Tech's Global Nanotechnology Database and other sources and illustrative case studies of U.S. small and medium-sized enterprises in nanotechnology shows that there are at least two different strategic approaches to enter this field and distinctive roles along the innovation pathway. A longer-term strategy is associated with nanotechnology research and discovery and possibly use of nanotechnologies to enhance properties of products. Another strategy is associated with a newer generation of firms with a strong focus on novel nanotechnology product development and commercialization and more intensive patenting activity.

The management of intellectual property (IP) – particularly in the form of patents – has become of increasing importance to small and mid-sized technology-oriented businesses. Firms seek a strategic approach to their own IP to maximize returns to their investments in research, new technologies and innovative products, processes and services, as well as to protect their competitive positions. There is also much strategic insight to be gained from understanding firms' IP approaches and through tracking IP patterns by sectors and technologies. Such comparative and aggregated analyses of IP used as a management tool can provide strategic and competitive intelligence that is of particular value in fast-developing technology sectors. This paper presents a framework and methodology to probe what efforts to acquire intellectual property can tell us – particularly when coupled with other sources of information – about corporate strategies to engage in and develop emerging technologies. This includes characterizing new technology-based firms in terms of their emphasis towards knowledge discovery and exploitation, the relationship of public innovation funding and patenting, and the role of external knowledge sources and collaborations. We also explore size, industry sector, and generational differences among nanotechnology firms in patenting. The paper is organized as follows. The next part (Section 2) discusses recent developments in IP and corporate strategies, sets the context of this research, and puts forward two propositions that offer explanations to patentable outputs and commercialization in emerging technologies in terms of firm-level factors. We then (in Section 3) describe our methodological approach, model and nanotechnology data. Findings are then presented (in Section 4) about corporate strategies in nanotechnology, drawing on statistical modeling and mini case studies. Section 5 discusses those findings and elaborates on their corporate and policy implications. The final part of the paper (Section 6) considers overall conclusions and discusses future steps for research.

This investigation examines IP submissions through recent patents in the field of nanotechnology to better understand corporate strategies to develop and exploit knowledge as firms move along innovation pathways from R&D to actual technology commercialization. The analysis focuses on how indicators of R&D activity (in particular, scientific publication and patenting outputs), collaborations, funding and firm characteristics can be used to garner strategic and competitive intelligence about the orientations and IP strategies of technology-based firms. We conduct a statistical analysis that draws on data from the Georgia Tech's Global Nanotechnology Database about the R&D activities of a set of U.S. nanotechnology SMEs and also analyze other sources and further elaborate on our findings based on two mini case studies of firms within this set. Our findings suggest that nanotechnology SMEs pursue at least two different strategies and adopt distinctive roles along innovation pathways in this emerging technology. A first, longer-term strategy is associated with nanotechnology research and discovery and possibly use of nanotechnologies to enhance properties of products. A second strategy is associated with a late entry into the field and a strong focus on nanotechnology commercialization as indicated by more intensive patenting activity. More generally, indicators of research output and patenting can be used to distill the technological targets of interest to emerging technology firms and their engagement in collaborative partnerships. The new U.S. nanotechnology firms with the greatest potential to develop commercial applications also tend to seek external support in the form of public research and development grants (and potentially other forms of finance or support not investigated here.) Such external research and development funding is associated with accelerated nanotechnology development and the initial steps of commercialization. Future research will be able to take advantage of improved data sources and new methods to exploit data and identify nanotechnology firms. In that context, researchers should explore alternative industry sector definitions – such as those that look at the value added by firms to the industry value chains – to better understand inter-sectoral differences. Differences across countries should be another focus of interest to further develop our theories of corporate strategies in emerging fields.