Firms' cooperative activities as driving factors of patent declaration on technological standards

In complex technologies, IPR is owned among several firms and technical innovation often overlaps. In situations of divided technical leadership cooperative activities are crucial to influence technology adoption. Standardization is a process to commonly agree on a technology. This article investigates the patent declaration behavior of 250 companies which participate in international standard bodies. Over 60,000 patent declarations were analyzed on a firm level basis to show how cooperative activities influence the inclusion of patents in technology standards. Our empirical results show that the involvement in related standards consortia as well as being a member in patent pools favors patent declaration. While the pool variable rather controls for the default mechanism that firms can only join pools when they declare essential IPR, our empirical analysis is able to isolate the positive consortia effect by controlling for a wide range of firm and standard characteristics. We apply panel analysis and find evidence for a positive dynamic effect of entering a standards consortium. We also find significant results for exogenous membership changes in standards consortia. Our findings proof that firms which participate in standards consortia increase their negotiation power in technology selection processes and are thus able to introduce more patents into standards.