Innovation, Technology Standardization and the Value of the Firm

Technology standards are defined by national and international organizations to select and disseminate the best technologies and practices. Using a measure of patent quality and a novel measure of the semantic proximity between patents and standards documents, this paper exploits the standardization process to disentangle the respective contributions of innovation and diffusion to firm value. Producing a patent increases a firm’s book value by 0.8% over the first eight years following the patent grant. However, this value deteriorates when the patent is not incorporated into a standard and diffused. In contrast, only firms whose patent specifications are included in a standard experience an additional increase in firm value of about 0.4% thereafter. Similar results are obtained when examining firms’ market-value and net worth. Finally, by studying firm-level productivity and markups, we show that the value gains associated with innovation stem from productivity improvements, whereas those associated with diffusion arise from rent extraction.