Multinational Company’s Open Patent Strategy Under Open Innovation

As a business,the fundamental objective of their business lies in the pursuit of profit maximization,so any strategic layout they made and the specific implementation of the strategy should first serve the goal, even enterprise innovation management is no exception.With the advent of the Internet era,the knowledge boundary has already broken through the traditional enterprise boundaries,knowledge which is made by enterprise itselves or from external increases greatly,and whether they can put this knowledge into the ability of innovation so as to improve value is also testing the companies.As more and more multinational companies begin to accept the open innovation ideas,innovation rules will also change the era which excessively relies on the patent system to stimulate the innovation will also cease to exist.The development of an enterprise is no longer just depends on how many patents it owns,instead,on how many patents that it owns can be exploited effectively,that is the number of patents that have been applied in the product.In recent years,there are many well-known multinational companies abroad have made the bold move to open patent,however,a similar approach can hardly be found in domestic companies,which implies that large multinational companies’ patent strategic thought is undergoing subtle changes.This study analyzes the motivations as well as the necessity and feasibility for multinational company to implement of open patent strategy under the open innovation,and summarizes the main modes of multinational companies to implement open patent strategy simultaneously.Besides,this study conducts a quantitative analysis on the question about the selection of the modes from the utility theory perspective.What’s more this study selects case to verify the discussion above,which will make much sense for those domestic enterprises which are understanding and studying multinational companies’ intellectual property management.This research content mainly includes the following aspects.This paper firstly summarizes the backgrounds for multinational company to implement of open patent strategy under the open innovation and puts forward the significance of this paper,also defining the study objective and the scope of the objective.Then,basing on the review of the domestic and foreign literature related to open patent strategies of multinational corporations,this paper describes the definition of open patent strategy and the main ways to open patent,that is open patent with or without preserving the patent right.Besides,this paper sums up economic,technical development and social reasons for multinational corporations to carry out this strategy from the theory study related.After summing up these three motivations,this paper demonstrates the necessity of open patent strategy from three perspectives, that is cost-benefits of innovation,relationship between the stage where the industry development is and economies of scale and competing for patented technology standards,and the feasibility of this strategy from other two perspectives,that is legal policies and patent management along its life cycle.Next,this paper accounts for three specific models completely,that is donations of non-core patents mode,free license of non-core patents mode and free license of core patents mode,meanwhile,by the quantitative analysis of the mode selection using the utility theory,this paper get an important finding,that is only when the number of the open patents controls in a suitable range can the enterprises gain benefits and promote value from this strategy,which means that it is not necessary to open more and more patents,even when the utility the company gain without opening patent is more than opening,this strategy should not be implemented.Then the paper chooses the cases of Tesla and Toyota opening patent in the new energy automotive industry to verify the above research,and stresses that this study is aim at those multinational companies with strong R&D ability again.Instead of following this blindly,enterprises in our country should make concrete analysis of concrete problems,and what they should learn is flexible patent strategy of multinational companies abroad.Finally,this paper points out the limitations of this study,as well as the future outlook for further research.