The importance (or not) of patents to UK firms

By Bronwyn H Hall, C. Helmers, Thomas F. Juster, Vania Sena. Oxford Economic Papers, 2013

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A surprisingly small number of innovative firms use the patent system. In the UK, the share of firms patenting among those reporting that they have innovated is about 4%. Survey data from the same firms support the idea that they do not consider patents or other forms of registered IP as important as informal IP for protecting inventions. We show that there are a number of explanations for these findings: most firms are SMEs, many innovations are new to the firm, but not to the market, and many sectors are not patent active. We find evidence pointing to a positive association between patenting and innovative performance measured as turnover due to innovation, but not between patenting and subsequent employment growth. The analysis relies on a new integrated dataset for the UK that combines a range of data sources into a panel at the enterprise level.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9897d1535a40f47726d26a7254e070a7917c6658

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Citations in the corpus

The Choice between Formal and Informal Intellectual Property: A Review (2014, background): “” Hall et al. (2013) offer another example of the endogeneity problem.”
A framework of intellectual property protection strategies and open innovation (2021, background): “Indeed, firms experiencing a lack of familiarity with IPPMs may select and use IPPMs in a suboptimal manner (Hall et al., 2013).”
Do tax incentives for research increase firm innovation? An RD design for R&D (2016, unknown): “Numerous studies have demonstrated a strong link between patenting and firm performance.25 Nevertheless, patents have their limitations (e.g. Hall et al., 2013).”
Migrant and ethnic diversity, cities and innovation: Firm effects or city effects? (2015, background): “A further benefit of these measures is that they are appropriate for innovation in services as well as other forms of innovation and so are more inclusive than patenting measures (for example, only 4% of innovation active firms patent (Hall et al., 2013)).”
Access to finance for innovative SMEs since the financial crisis (2015, background): “An alternative innovation measure would be patenting, but only 4 per cent of innovation active firms actually do this (Hall et al. 2013).”