Abstracts
Patent Pool Inclusion: A Study of Patents in the Optical Disc Industry
Amol Joshi, University of Hawaii, USA
Atul Nerkar, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Girish Mallapragada, Indiana University, USA
A patent pool is a collaborative licensing arrangement that enables participating licensors to conveniently bundle fragmented intellectual property (IP) rights for complementary technologies into a commercially valuable form. The inclusion of patents into a pool is a decision made by an independent examiner and firms often have little control in influencing this decision. However, it is important for firms to understand what factors may be driving the selection of a specific patent into the pool. Drawing on organizational heuristics we argue that firms have to rely on simple rules to understand the selection process and therefore propose the observable characteristics of patents, specifically, value and imitability of patents may help predict the inclusion of the patents into the pool. We test our hypotheses on a set of 15778 patents owned by a group of 17 firms of which 341 patents were ultimately included into a patent pool formed in 1999. Results from our model suggest that both value and inimitability of a patent, independently and jointly positively influence the patent's ultimate inclusion in the patent pool. Our findings help managers decide which patents need to be considered for submission to the pool to increases the chance of selection. Such an understanding is important because inclusion in a patent pool would allow the firm to not only increase revenue stream from licensign but would also allow it to influence and reshape technology evolution in the industry. Our study contributes to an emerging body of literature on patent pools, a critical and evolving alternative to bilateral licensing between firms, and throws light on an important aspect of the patent pool formation.
