Intellectual Property Strategies of Multinational Companies Patenting in China

While global intellectual property trends show a stable rate of worldwide patent applications during the last five years, patent applications in emerging economies strongly increased within the same period. Unless the increasing number of applications in emerging economies, the indigenous legal systems in those countries are mostly not able to effectively protect intellectual property rights of multinational companies. Still, we observe the phenomenon of a strongly increasing rate of technology patenting in countries with weak appropriability regimes. This article studies patenting strategy archetypes of the world’s largest patent applicants using the case of China as an empirical context. Using Questel’s professional patent search application Orbit, we build a unique data set of the world’s top patent applicants combining data from the World Intellectual Property Organization and the State Intellectual Property Office of China comprising data of about 620.000 patents. Referring to the study of Keupp et al. (2012), we extend previous qualitative studies on patenting strategy archetypes by adding quantitative evidence from a data set of the world’s largest intellectual property owners. Model based clustering reveals the existence of five patent strategy archetypes of companies patenting in economies with weak appropriability regimes.