evidence for start-up firms on the role of patents as signals to investors, in particular to Venture Capitalists. This study …&D for a panel of established firms. The results show that patents do indeed attenuate financing constraints for small firms …

This paper tests a number of hypotheses on the use and effectiveness of patents and trade secrets designed to protect … innovation. While previous studies have often considered patents and trade secrets as substitutes for one another, we investigate … for the same innovation or for different innovations. Employing firm panel data from Germany, we find fairly few …

holders. The paper focuses on those full-term German patents of the application year 1977 which were held by West German and U ….S. residents. The most valuable patents in our data account for a large fraction of the cumulative value over all observations …

Gaining access to technological assets and patents, in particular, has long been a major motive and objective for firm … acquisitions. On the one hand, patents are used as a building instrument for the acquirer's technology portfolio. On the other hand …, patents can be attractive because of their strategic value as a bargaining chip, e.g. in licensing negotiations. This is …

Many studies investigate the relationship between R&D expenditures as an input and patents as an intermediate product … Belgian firms. It turns out that only the 'R' part of R&D expenditure has a significant effect on patents and that development …

start applying for patents on technologies which are not yet mature in order to cover ideas that may eventually turn … single mature technologies is initiated and accelerated when network effects are present or patents exhibit a blocking …

disclosure requirement of patents generates some spillover and at the same time allows firms to appropriate knowledge. In this … paper we empirically analyze whether protection by secrecy or protection by patents is associated with lower knowledge … methods. Our estimations show that the usage of both, patents and secrecy, hinders the innovation activities of firms through …

impact on incremental innovations. This impact is largely independent of the participation in R&D cooperations. Spillovers … for incremental innovations rather than for drastic innovations. To a limited degree R&D cooperations can help to overcome … the difficulties in using spillovers for drastic innovations. Furthermore, our estimates provide evidence that a firm …

both market-based (e.g. secrecy, lead time) as well as legal knowledge protection strategies (e.g. patents, trademarks) of …