عوامل مؤثر بر اختراعات quadic: دسترسی به بازار، تهدید تقلید، رقابت و استحکام حقوق مالکیت معنوی

This paper analyzes firms' decisions to seek intellectual property rights in global markets, particularly in China. We introduce the notion of a ‘quadic patent,’ defined as a patent family that consists of patent applications filed at the European Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and the national patent office of a fourth country. We examine the determinants of quadic patenting at the industry level for China, and at the country level for a sample of 38 countries. Our results indicate that quadic patenting is driven by the need to access markets, respond to imitative threats, and compete in product markets.

As the world economy becomes increasingly integrated, firm-level R&D activities have, accordingly, become increasingly internationalized [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5]. As this trend has developed, patent protection has been expanding geographically as patent applications increasingly extend beyond the regions in which inventions are first patented or in which the associated inventive activity occurs [6] and [7]. While a vast and growing body of literature has analyzed the internationalization of R&D activities, only a limited number of studies have explored the factors contributing to the internationalization of patenting activities. Grupp and Schmoch [8] provide case-study evidence that a firm tends to patent in a foreign country when that country is perceived as the firm's preferred market, even when the invention underlying a patent originates elsewhere. This insight has been confirmed by a handful of econometric studies that have examined the factors shaping patenting by foreigners in a country or a group of countries [9], [10] and [11]. While early studies focused on patenting activities in advanced countries [9] and [10], recent studies have taken a broader perspective, analyzing patenting in emerging economies as well [11], [12], [13] and [14]. A key weakness of these cross-country studies has been the use of national patents, which display considerable variation in quality across countries. As a result of these quality differences, which arise from differences in patent laws and conventions, national patents are at best an imperfect measure for use in cross-country comparisons [8]. To overcome the shortcomings associated with using only national patent statistics, this paper introduces a new measure that we call a ‘quadic patent’ and examines its determinants in two separate panel data analyses, first across 19 manufacturing industries in China, and thereafter at the national level across a sample of 38 countries. Quadic patents provide a country-specific measure that we define as a patent family consisting of patent applications made at four locations: the national patent office of the country in question, the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Quadic patents represent patents that are of substantial innovative value because patents applied for at what are generally known as the triadic patent offices (the EPO, the JPO, and the USPTO) have wide geographic scope, spanning the most advanced and technologically sophisticated regions of the world [15]. Therefore in analyzing global patenting activities, the use of quadic patents eliminates country bias that is often associated with national patents, ensuring comparability of patenting activities across an array of countries. As we explain in Section 3, quadic patenting has become very important in many emerging economies, but most significantly in China. Between 1985 and 2005, the proportion of triadic patent families that contained patents filed with China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) increased from 9% to 61% and continues to grow. Quadic patenting in China represents the most dominant type of patenting in all non-triadic countries (countries excluding EPO members, Japan, and the US). In other words, China is rapidly emerging as an important destination for patent applications filed by companies seeking intellectual property rights outside of the triadic countries. From a theoretical perspective, we argue that quadic patenting in China is in part a capability exploitation strategy aimed at tapping into the vast and growing Chinese market by multinational corporations (MNCs) [16] and [17]. While such a knowledge exploitation strategy is well known in the international business literature, it has been employed previously mainly to inform foreign investment decisions by MNCs [18]. We also propose another, complementary, explanation of quadic patenting. Growing competition in many industries has induced firms to undertake strategic patenting—an activity they pursue to ensure the patentability of their future inventions by warding off potential competing patents, and to strengthen their positions in strategic negotiations with rivals. Among the factors we consider to be important drivers of quadic patenting are the size of a local market as well as the extent of foreign penetration in that market, as indicated in the findings of prior studies on international patenting [9], [10], [11], [12] and [13]. While the size of a market indicates to a considerable extent the potential for exploiting a firm's knowledge resources in that market, the need to protect those resources derives from the ability of local manufacturers to imitate a firm's technologies [12] and [13] as well as the degree of competition in that market [13], [19], [20], [21] and [22]. To capture the imitative capability of local manufacturers—including not only indigenous firms but also foreign firms operating in the host country—we introduce a novel measure that we define as the number of triadic patents one or more inventors of which are located in the host country. This measure represents the technological sophistication of local manufacturing, and therefore is a useful alternative to the conventional measure of technological capability, namely R&D, for which comparable data is either absent or of poor quality, particularly for Chinese manufacturing industries. Quadic patenting is triggered not only by technological competition but by product market competition as well. Employing data on sales revenues of firms, we derive an index to measure product market competition in China at the two-digit manufacturing level. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study that explicitly examines the role of product market competition in shaping international patenting activities. Our analysis at the national level across a sample of non-triadic countries offers the possibility of testing the importance of an additional variable—the strength of the intellectual property rights (IPR) regime in host countries [23], [24] and [25]. In the following section we describe the theory that informs our analysis, after which we present the hypotheses we tested with the data. Section 3 details the data and discusses trends in quadic patenting activities. The variables and the econometric model are explained in Section 4. The results of the analyses are discussed in Section 5, and the final section summarizes the findings and implications, acknowledges the study's limitations, and suggests future directions for related research.

We undertook this study in a world economy undergoing intensifying globalization, as inventions created in one part of the world are increasingly patented elsewhere. A handful of studies have explored the factors driving the internationalization of patenting using national patents almost exclusively, but such patents can differ significantly in quality across countries. In this paper we introduced the notion of a quadic patent, which we define as a patent family in which patent applications for the same inventions are filed at the triadic patent offices (the EPO, the JPO and the USPTO) as well as at the national patent office of a fourth country. Since all quadic patents span three of the world's most technologically and economically advanced regions (Europe, Japan, and the United States), they represent patents of comparable quality. Our analysis suggests that the quadic patent is a novel and useful concept and analytic tool in technological forecasting and management as well as in formulating science and technology policy. We use quadic patenting to enrich the concept of a patent family in the era of globalization, characterizing the spread of inventive and patenting activities beyond the triadic countries to emerging economies. We use this recent patenting phenomenon also to add a new perspective to the understanding of innovation activities in emerging economies and the business strategies of MNCs operating there. These developments reflect a shift in the share of quadic patenting from developed countries such as Canada and Australia to emerging economies, most notably China. The share of triadic patents seeking IPR protection in China has risen to over 60% in recent years. Nearly all quadic patenting activities in China originates from abroad, and therefore our empirical analyses can be compared with the extant literature on foreign patenting in China. Bringing together data on production, trade, and patents, we examined the factors shaping quadic patenting at the level of two-digit Chinese manufacturing industries. We also extended our analysis to include the determinants of quadic patenting at the country level for a sample of 38 countries. Our analyses confirmed that quadic patenting in China is driven to a significant extent by the knowledge-exploitation potential offered by the vast Chinese market (market access). In addition to the immense absolute size of local manufacturing industries, the extent to which foreign firms have penetrated the Chinese market through local production and sales in China and through China's imports has had an important influence on quadic patenting. We demonstrated further that the imitative threat posed by manufacturing industries in China has also spurred quadic patenting. Finally, intense competition in Chinese markets has been another important factor causing quadic patenting activity there. A similar analysis at the country level on a sample of 38 non-triadic countries confirmed the broad findings on the importance of market size and the imitative threat posed by host-country firms. In addition, the cross-country study also highlighted the importance of the strength of IPR protection as a positive factor in shaping quadic patenting. The study contributes to the empirical literature a novel measure of innovative capability, namely triadic patents originating in a given country, defined as the count of triadic patents of which one or more inventors reside in that country. The ready availability of patent data with rich information on the location of inventive activities made it easy to construct this measure, which is of comparable quality across countries. Therefore this indicator is a useful alternative to R&D, for which consistent data is missing for many countries, especially for China at the sectoral level. Finally, to the best of our knowledge this is the first study that explicitly takes into account, and finds evidence for, the contribution of local market competition to international patenting. This paper also makes important contributions to the theoretical literature. Prior studies on international patenting have adopted a largely empirical perspective. In this paper we related quadic patenting to the notion of knowledge exploitation, originally employed in the literature on foreign investment, and based our analyses also on the resource-based view of the firm. We argued, on the one hand, that three key factors driving quadic patenting—market access, imitative threat, and competitive pressure—indicate a firm-level knowledge exploitation strategy. On the other hand, we connected the significance of product market competition to the resource-based view of the firm as well, suggesting that quadic patenting may in part reflect strategic patenting motives—patenting aimed at facilitating future technological progress rather than immediately exploiting existing knowhow. Finally, we acknowledge that our study is not without limitations. While we suggested knowledge exploitation and strategic motives as two key factors driving quadic patenting, empirically distinguishing these two factors is beyond the scope of our study, suggesting a target for investigation in future research on foreign patenting. Second, our cross-country regression analysis used only manufacturing imports as a measure of foreign penetration, and were unable to include FDI into manufacturing industries—another mechanism for entering foreign markets—due to the scarcity of relevant data. Third, the variable “triadic patents originating in China (or in the country)” cannot fully capture the imitative capability of local manufacturers because even though some of these manufacturers do not patent, they indeed imitate technologies or products patented by other firms. Fourth, we tested our hypotheses only at the country and sector levels. A more nuanced understanding of the motives underlying quadic patenting would require analyses at the firm level. Fifth, we focused on understanding patenting outside of the triadic countries—Europe, Japan and the United States. Therefore, we have not accounted for differences in patenting activities between the triadic countries, such as, for example, between Germany and Portugal. Patenting activities in these countries, relative to other regions of the world, especially in new and emerging technologies, are an important topic for future research.