Essays on market for technology and patent strategy

Abstract

Although traditional perspective on innovation is that entire process is conducted within organizational boundaries of single firms, it is recently stressed the importance of acquiring external knowledge from the technological market for the innovation. With growing the active transaction of the technological market, this dissertation focus on dynamic patent environment surrounded the firms and its impacts on firms’ strategies. This dissertation consists of three studies in relation to major activities and key actors of the technology market. The first study, “The effects of licensing-in on innovative performance in different technological regimes” examines the effect of licensing-in on innovative performance of the firms and identifies the boundary conditions when this effect is greater in terms of the technological regime. The second study, “When do firms acquire external patents through the market transaction? A perspective on performance feedback” suggests search derived by performance feedback as one of the determinants of demand-side motivation to join the technology transaction market, drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm. A third study, “The impacts of patent litigation with NPE on firms’ patent strategy” attempts to analyze the effect of patent disputes with NPEs on the subsequent patenting activities from the perspective of the firms that are sued. These studies increase the better understanding of technology market and firms’ overall innovation activities.