Corporate Science in the Patent System: An Analysis of the Semiconductor Technology

Abstract

Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW.Download this ZEW Discussion Paper from our ftp server:ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/dp/dp10098.pdf Non-technical SummaryCorporate scientific publications are often presented as a strategic means for firms to create prior art with the objective to prevent rivals from patenting related inventions. This defensive disclosure strategy has attracted the attention of academic scholars in the field of law, economics and management science. The academic literature has developed different answers to the question why firms engage in defensive publishing at the costs of forgoing the right to exclude third parties from using the invention by applying for a patent. One stream of the literature, mainly put forward by economic scholars, analyzes defensive publishing in the context of patent race models. In these models, the laggard in the race has incentives to publish preliminary results that are not patentable in order to prolong the patent race. Scholars in law and management science consider open disclosure as a complementary strategy to patenting. The latter perspective finds partial confirmation in interviews with patent experts in the corporate sector, while the patent race model is largely rejected by practitioners. Both streams of the literature assume that corporate publications enter the pool of prior art which is relevant to judge the novelty of patent applications at the patent office and that they have the power to block or hinder patent applications. This proposed mechanism behind corporate publications as a means to preempt patents on related technologies so far lacked empirical evidence.This paper provides a first (large-scale) analysis of the effectiveness of corporate scientific publications regarding their power to block rivals' patents. With focus on the semiconductor technology we show that scientific publications by corporations challenge the novelty and the inventive step of patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO) significantly more than other pieces of prior art. Hence, we show that the mechanism behind the concept of defensive publishing works. Further, detailed information from the EPO patent examination procedure allows us to show that corporate publications threaten the novelty of patent applications in combination with other pieces of prior art, like patents, rather than as standalone documents. This supports the view of practitioners and scholars in law and management science who argue that corporate scientific publishing can be an...

Why do firms publish? A systematic literature review and a conceptual framework

“…This line of research has also outlined how scientific openness is a critical element of a firm's IP strategy to affect prior art. Strategic scientific disclosures, namely defensive publishing, can exert a major impact on patent races (e. g. Bar, 2006;Della Malva and Hussinger, 2012;Johnson, 2014; 1 Most of the studies that were snowballed from the initial sample included, in their full text, at least one of the keywords reported in Table 1. However, these studies were not identified by our query since WoS searches do not extend to the full text of publications.…”

The Interplay between Product Innovation, Publishing, Patenting and Developing Standards

“…Among the 25 firms with the highest number of declarations related to standards released by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute is Siemens the only German firm (Bekkers et al, 2020a). patents of competitors, without incurring cost of acquiring formal intellectual property measures (Barrett, 2002;Gans et al, 2017;Hayter and Link, 2018;Johnson, 2014;Della Malva and Hussinger, 2012;Pénin, 2007). Publishing can also help to commercialize innovations, as they can signal the effectiveness of products to potential users (Azoulay, 2002;Hicks, 1995;Rafols et al, 2014), or encourage regulators to approve products (Penders and Nelis, 2011).…”

“…Recent studies analyzed its impact on innovation performance Henderson, 1998, Jong andSlavova, 2014;Li et al, 2015), firm valuation (Arora et al, 2018;Pellens and Della Malva, 2018;Simeth and Cincera, 2016), and economic competitors (Della Malva and Hussinger, 2012). The same is the case for the development of standards.…”

The Market Value of Blocking Patent Citations

“…First, the combination of patents and scientific documents which typically cover rather basic technological advances that need to be combined with applied technologies to be novelty challenging (Della Malva and Hussinger, 2010) are Y-type citations. Second, patent families that threaten the novelty of patent applications are cited as Ys.…”