Factors and Mechanisms that Promote Patent Licensing:Empirical Research Review and Prospects
Patent licensing,as a type of technology licensing,is an important way for innovators to increase innovation profits and is also an important component of corporate patent strategies.As the patent licensing market gradually matures,innovative entities face increasingly complex licensing decisions,which not only include decisions about whether to license externally but also involve contract design issues such as license pricing and restrictive clauses,as well as the construction of platforms and mechanisms such as cross-licensing and open licensing,including the participation of multiple entities such as universities,enterprises,patent management agencies,and market intermediaries,affecting multiple types of innovation behaviors such as R&D costs,innovation efficiency,and innovation diffusion.This article uses keywords such as patent licensing open patent in both of Chinese and English to search academic literature in Web of Science,Elsevier,Weily,Informs,and CNKI,retain empricial research on patent licensing,exclude pa-pers that discussed the transformation of scientific and technological achievements,corporate innovation,which uses patent licensing data but deviated themes.Finally,111 papers were selected,including 93 English papers and 18 Chinese papers.Through reviewing all the selected paper,this article makes contributions in the following four aspects.First,this article proposes a patent licensing research framework based on summarizing key issues in empirical re-search.Specifically,research issues on patent licensing include four major categories:licensing propensity,licensing transac-tions,licensing contracts,and licensing platform and mechanism design.Among them,licensing propensity research focuses on the decision-making of licensors and licensees,involving rent dissipation theory,complementary innovation theory,etc.The design of the license contract includes payment methods,exclusivity clauses,etc.,which can inhibit and signal moral hazard.Licensing platforms and mechanisms include three categories:standard essential patent licensing,patent pool cross-licensing,and open licensing,involving transaction costs and open innovation theory.Secondly,this article summarizes the mechanism of patent licensing deals,and promotes the integration of economic management theories on patent licensing practices.Specifically,factors include patent technology characteristics such as pat-ent value,commercialization potential,technology centrality,and degree of recessiveness;innovator characteristics such as resource endowment,market position,transaction experience,product differentiation,and vertical integration;environmen-tal factors such as competition,patent system,industrial policy,and university technology transfer policy are discussed and interact in various patent licensing issues.Overall,due to the limitations of data availability,existing research has gaps in the discussion of payment methods,ex-clusive terms,and decision-making behaviors at the platform mechanism level.Currently,Chinese scholars have gradually improved the datasets such as patent licensing filing data and patent joint venture filing data.The empirical research has steadily increased.However,many studies focus on information science questions,exploring the innovation network rela-tionship between patent licensing parties.Empirical research on licensing mechanisms,such as patent licensing deci-sion-making and patent pools,still has a large gap with research in Europe and the United States.
patent licensing propensitieslicensing transactioncontract designplatform and mechanismliterature re-view
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