Classical patent literature assumes that patents grant well-defined legal rights to exclude others from practicing an … invention. In this scenario, start-up companies benefit from the exclusive right to commercialize patent-protected inventions … and the certification effect of patents which signals the ventures' “quality” to investors. If the decision about patent …

innovation. While previous studies have often considered patents and trade secrets as substitutes for one another, we investigate … the complementary role of the two protection methods. We identify protection strategies for single innovation firms and … for the same innovation or for different innovations. Employing firm panel data from Germany, we find fairly few …

ownership fragmentation on investments related to innovation for firms with small patent portfolios. Hold-up threats are … between downstream firms and upstream patentees negatively affect investments in innovation for firms with large patent … residual physical investments. The effects of patent thickets on innovation are thus not uniform. They depend on the …

, but only for firms that engage in in-licensing and only for product innovation. The relationship between fragmentation and … innovative performance also depends on the size of a firm's patent portfolio, which suggests an important strategic role for …

. While the individual effects of engaging in the listed practices on firm innovation are well-understood, the existing … sample of innovation-active firms from the German Community Innovation Survey, which includes information on the development … of standards, enhanced with information on firms' engagement in patenting and publishing. We find that 26% of innovation …

forward citations patents can receive at the European Patent Office. While a patent can be cited as non-infringing state of … the art, it can also be cited because it threatens the novelty of patent applications (“blocking citations”). Empirical …. This finding adds to the patent value literature by showing that different types of patent citations carry different …

quality) than their European counterparts after patent rights for software inventions were introduced. We then introduce a …

output. Research units that source research ideas from small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) patent more, but not more …

of critical knowledge. Given that a patent specification has to include a clear description of the patented matter so … to patent law. This paper provides a model identifying the incentives for firms to deliberately obscure their inventive … knowledge in a patent specification …

patent quantity is driven by knowledge exchange rather than joint R&D. Firms engaged in joint R&D, on the other hand, receive … more forward citations per patent indicating that joint R&D enhances patent quality. In light of literature on strategic …