Alliance Motivation,Patent Strategy And Firms’ Innovative Performance

Bring the patent strategies into analysis, this study aims at unveil the black box between the relationship between alliance motivation and firms’innovative performance. Based on the conceptual definition of firms’ alliance motivation, patent strategy and innovative performance, this study illustrates the relationships among alliance motivation, patent strategy and firms’ innovative performance, and constructs the analytical framework among the three key factors. After analyzing the influencing mechanism of alliance motivation on firms’choice of patent strategies, this study explains how the patent strategy mix enhances the transformation from alliance motivation to firms’ innovative performance, in hope to set theoretical basis on the firms’ alliance opportunity, choices of partners, patent strategy decision-making and the enhancement of innovative performance.First, this study defines alliance motivation, patent strategy and firms’ innovative performance on the basis of existing studies, and then constructs the comprehensive research framework of alliance motivation based on the technological capability and market position, and differentiates the alliance motivation or intension into technological motivation, market motivation and technological+market motivation; according to the analytical framework of patent strategy established by Somaya and some other scholars, this study distinguishes among different patent strategies; at last, defines the firms’ innovative performance into innovative efficiency and innovative output. With the definition above, this study then uncovers how alliance motivation influences firms" choice of patent strategies, and how the patent strategy mix enhances the realization of innovative performance, and then proposes two sets of hypothesis.Second, take the technological alliance of global IT industry as the sample, this study extracts the alliance data from MERIT-CATI Database, from which the firms with higher participation in the alliance in IT industry were selected, and combines the R&D Scoreboard released by the BIS of UK, this study finally chooses72firms with higher participation and R&D intensity as sample firms. In terms of the division of alliance motivation, text mining technique is applied to extract the alliance information of sample firms in the research period, and quantifies the alliance motivation of sample forms based on the key words, and use percentage of different motivation to denote alliance motivation; accesses the R&D expenditure, sales and market capitalization data from the R&D Scoreboard of BIS; retrieves the granted patents of invention of the sample firms from USPTO, on one hand to use it as the patent output of alliance firms, on the other, with the definition of patent strategy, the granted patent data is applied to quantize firms’ patent strategies together with HHI index, the changes in patenting technological area, patent license, cross-license and also the technological standard. With all these key indicators quantized, descriptive analysis and correlation analysis is conducted.Third, binary choice model is used to test the impact of alliance motivation on firms’ choice of patent strategy, and then summaries the strategies alliance firms would choose, which is then applied as the basis of empirical test of the relationships between alliance motivation, patent strategy and firms’ innovative performance. Considering the different alliance motivation among firms, this study classifies the sample firms into different groups according to their motivation. Unbalanced panel data model and negative binomial model are used here to check to effect of patent strategy and alliance motivation on firms’ innovative performance. Based on these empirical analysis, this study finds that the alliance motivation enhances the choice the patent strategies, and the strategies firms chose demonstrates some regularity, that is the choice of firms’ patent strategies is highly related to its alliance motivation, technological capability and market position; the technological alliance firms constructed or attended influenced its innovative performance by virtue of patent strategy mix, and the effect not only depends on the drive of alliance motivation and the direction of effort, but also firms’ technological capability and market position.