A taxonomy of utility model patents application strategy

The utility model technology with a short life-cycle and is easy to copy characteristics grant rights without going through a substantive examination and are promoted for small and medium enterprise (SMEs) by some countries- Germany, Japan, Korea or China. The purpose of this paper is to understand how people adopted the utility model to protect their innovation by investigating the types of application strategies of 179,349 utility model patents and 16,234 technology evaluation reports during 2004 to 2011 in Taiwan. Two variables make up the construct of patent application strategy, namely and The taxonomy result identifies three categories of patent application strategy-analysis pattern, combination pattern and focus pattern by using two variables- the ratio of patent and utility model and the ratio of technology evaluation report and utility model and using three variables- the number of utility patent, the number of utility model patent and the number of technology evaluation report, to validate the naming of cluster. Besides, the results showed that although utility model have lower technical and economic value than patents, utility model still applied by many companies, especially for SMEs and personal inventors.