What is Patent Management? The Purification and Validation of an Integrated Measurement Scale

Academics and practitioners have since decades been interested in the organizational and managerial aspects of patent management. However, little attention has been devoted to validating and testing a measurement scale of patent management. With this background, the current article aims to empirically assess the factor structure of a patent management measurement scale, purify the scale, and validate it. The methodology follows the widely recognized procedure for scale validation and focuses on two steps: scale purification through an exploratory factor analysis on survey data and scale finalization through a confirmatory factor analysis performed on another set of data. The article yields that patent management has five core processes, namely generation, freedom to operate, portfolio management, exploitation and enforcement, and intelligence, as well as two supporting dimensions, namely strategy and organization for patenting. For each of these core processes and supporting dimensions, we outline the formative subconstructs as well as how these subconstructs are reflected in observable and measurable items. With the validity analysis, we show the significant impact of patent management on radical innovation performance.