Patent licensability and life: A study of US patents registered by South Korean public research institutes

Abstract

The quality and value of a patent can be represented by several proxies, such as how often the patent is cited in other patents, whether it is licensed, and the age of the patent. The paper uses a binary choice model to investigate factors affecting patent licensing, and it uses double-bounded tobit and duration models to investigate factors affecting patent life. Explanatory variables and dependent variables are extracted from U.S. patent information and related data. Findings suggest research collaboration has a positive effect on both patent licensing and patent life. Other characteristics such as invention size, namely, the scope of the invention measured by number of claims, and organizational technological cumulativeness, measured by self-citation counts, also affect patent life.