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abstract

Using information from a survey of US inventors, this study explores the reasons for patent non-use and different types of non-use at the patent level, and how this varies by industry and firm characteristics. We find that 55% of triadic patents are commercialized. We also find that 17% of all triadic patents are not commercialized but are at least partially for preemption, though only 3% of all triadic patents are purely preemptive patents. We find that preemptive non-use is less common than failed patents. We then test the discriminating effects of patent effectiveness, competition, firm size and fragmentation of patent rights on the likelihood of preemptive patents. We find that greater patent effectiveness, more competition, and large firm size are associated with greater preemptive non-use relative to commercial use of patents. We conclude with the policy implications of our results.

5. Discussion and conclusions

Our results show almost half of triadically patented inventions are not used, and that there are different types of non-use of patents. Some non-commercialized patents may still be prospects for future commercialization, and others may be failed patents. Moreover, some patents play an important role in firm strategy beyond protecting commercialized inventions or facilitating licensing. The preemptive non-use of patents includes providing insurance against infringement suits, ensuring freedom to operate, and preventing rivals from inventing around a commercialized invention. For the US, we find 45% of triadic patents are not commercially used. This is comparable to Torrisi et al.(2015)’s statistics, where 39% of patent applications from the US respondents are not used. Out of non-commercialized patents (i.e. non-use patents), about 40% are (non-exclusively) preemptive patents (17% of all triadic patents), but only 6% end up as exclusively preemptive patents (i.e., only about 3% of all triadic patents). We also find signifi- cant heterogeneity in rates of preemptive non-use. Stronger patent protection, more technological competition and large firm size predict relatively more preemptive patents rather than commercial patents, while technical value shows the opposite result.