We investigate the reasons why different governance modes are used in a sample of successful collaborative patenting activities in Europe. First we show that collaboration activities in the patenting process are much more common than one may expect by looking only at information on co-assignment. Indeed, collaborative patenting activity accounts for more than a quarter of all patents in our sample. This figure is about eight times higher than that from co-assignment data (usually considered to assess cooperation in patenting). We then examine the impact of organizational, individual and project determinants on the choice of three possible modes of governance: coassignment,co-invention, collaborative agreement. We find that higher project complexity and technological scope are associated to tighter modes of governance. We also find a significant negative relationship between licensing and co-assignment, thus providing some support to the view that some licensing can be the result of ex-ante legal agreements rather than of the presence of a market for technology. Finally, inventor specific characteristics matter too. In particular, age increases the probability of choosing looser governance modes while better education is associated to tighter modes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: