Research on management of patent applications about long life-cycle electric appliances

A lot of patent rights are used for producing assembled products like electric appliances. And electric appliances like digital cameras have very long product life-cycle. High-ranking Japanese electronics companies file several thousands of patent applications each year for protecting own products. In view of the product life-cycle, the sales of long product life-cycle products tends to be flat after the mature phase and each company cannot get enough sales and profits. However, some companies continue to file excess patent applications after the mature phase. This kind of patent applications will not be contributory to corporate profitability. We think this is the reason why each company pays careful attention to other competitor's number of patent applications and don't consider own financial indicators (for example, sales, income, and R&D expense) which are related to corporate performances. Therefore, in this study, we took up some Japanese electronics companies and analyzed correlations among these companies' accumulated number of patent applications and correlations between each company's accumulated number of patent applications and its financial indicators. From the result of analyses, we propose IP management for reducing useless patent applications after the mature phase.