Book 2011 Chapter 1
Corbel, P. and Le Bas, C. « L’évolution des fonctions du brevet : tendances nouvelles et implications » in P. Corbel and C. Le Bas, Les nouvelles fonctions du brevet – Approches économiques et managériales, Economica, December 2011, pp. 1-21
Introduction:
Patent management has long been regarded as a task for experts. In the world of academic research, most publications on the subject were concentrated around a small number of journals (Grandstrand, 1999: 89). There is a reason for this: until recently, patenting was seen as a way of excluding other players from the economic use of protected technological knowledge (see, for example, Guellec and van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, 2007). It prevents other players from producing, using or selling the protected invention without the patent holder's permission (Granstrand, 1999: 71). In more strategic terms, patents are a means of obtaining temporary "monopoly positions", or of protecting certain characteristics of a company's products or processes. This makes them an obvious source of differentiation. But they are not just that. As Reitzig (2004a: 457) has pointed out, the days are long gone when economists regarded a patent as a guarantee of temporary monopoly power. On the one hand, recent research has shown that patents have limited effectiveness in this role, and on the other, that new functions of patents need to be taken into account. In other words, holding patents allows for a wide variety of strategic behaviours. As a result, the strategic management of intellectual property, and patents in particular, has become an increasingly important research concern (Hufker & Alpert, 1994, Nickerson & Silverman, 1998, Reitzig, 2004b, Tao et al., 2005, Corbel, 2007). However, studies very rarely take into account all the new functions of the patent. The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of the identifiable functions of the patent, so as to highlight the main strategic implications of this complex process of patent filing.
The chapter is structured as follows: first the more traditional functions relating to the protection of innovation are analysed (section 1), followed by those associated with trade and finance (section 2), the defensive role of the patent (section 3) and the input function in the innovation process (section 4). Each section gives a precise definition of the function, then examines how it has evolved in relation to the economic, industrial (competition) and technological environment. This provides the material needed to analyse the implications of these functions in terms of strategy (section 5). Particular emphasis is placed on the implications of the new functions, but also on the interactions between the functions (which could only be done at the end of this investigation, once the functions were better described).