دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی حسابرسی پرونده سهام استثمار استراتژیک: پشتیبانی تصمیم برای مدیران - امرالد 2018

INTRODUCTION

The quick transformations in the world economy have required firms to open to new ideas and acknowledge the importance of Intellectual Property (IP) to achieve a competitive advantage and profit from its commercial use (Hall & Ziedonis 2001; Gans & Stern, 2010). The acquisition of advantage from knowledge and its transformation into IP rights (Yoon et al. 2008) has resulted in several economic benefits for firms: getting a powerful market positioning, increasing their market, and conveying an image of high-level innovation. These targets cannot be pursued unless a strategic use of IP is adopted (Pitkethly 2007; Somaya 2012). Patents, similarly to the other forms of IP, represent value assets and, as such, their proper strategic management can affect firm value creation (Klaila & Hall 2000; Teece, 2000). As is usual with all value assets, firms should understand the actual contribution of the patents to reach the objectives and, consequently, take on to manage patents in a strategic way by assessing their technological and monetary value (Jeong & Yoon 2015; Ponomarev et al. 2014). It is well known that highly technological firms, not only large ones, but also SMEs, benefit from patenting and own a multitude of patents in the result of the acceleration in the growth of their trend of patenting. This is because often firms’ patenting answers the need for maintaining the strategic positioning in a given technology, or for expanding their activity in a different technological area from the core one, or for protecting or blocking their technological inventions from other competitors. For these reasons, we can say that several factors lead firm managers to analyze the actual technology condition of patent portfolios. First of all, the frequently changeable technological context that requires a continual refresh of patent congruence with the firm goals. Second, the obsolescence, over time, of patents that end up to lose their core quality to the company for many of which it could be devised a better purpose. Third, firm budgetary adjustments that could inspire patent exploitation actions.

CONCLUSIONS

It is acknowledged that, since large companies hold relevant resources, they are facilitated in putting into effect an IP strategy and handle IP issues promptly. However, large corporations have to cope with several IP strategy problems, such as the need for a continued investment to support their technological and innovation strength and for an appropriate strategic management of patents. In this view, the aim of this paper was to shape a framework that could support the decision of IP managers on the strategic supervision of patent portfolios. The framework has been built to provide a suitable decision support tool that was in-line with the expectations by the IP managers of the involved companies. The developed framework has proved to be particularly able to understand whether patents are aligned to the overall business strategy, to select those that are not aligned and to identify the most appropriate exploitation strategy for each patent of the portfolio. Moreover, the empirical findings of the application of our framework have substantiated the possibility for the managers of a large company to be effectively supported in quickly assessing technologies of their voluminous patent portfolios when tackling their decision process on the exploitation of each patent. This has been confirmed by the fact that the companies, once approved of the suggestions provided by the framework, implemented them promptly. Moreover, the usefulness and practicability of the framework have been validated by questioning the involved managers that acknowledge that they derived faster decisions when using the framework.