The Relationship Between The Patent Quality Of Listed Companies And Their Tobin's Q Value

In the high-tech industry with relatively dense science and knowledge,patents are an important component of enterprises intangible assets to some extent.A few core patents of the enterprises are even the important support for dividing the industry value chain and joining the market competition.As China's manufacturing industry is actively shifting to the value chains' high-end,the extensive economy development pattern is gradually replaced by the green and sustainable pattern.Patents,as important products and worthy achievements of enterprise research,development and technical strength,are increasingly valued by more enterprises.Since 2015,China has become the country with the largest number of patent applications.But compared with the large size of the patent number,there is great promotion space for the quality for the overall patents.The importance of improving the patent quality and how to improve it are becoming one of the focuses in enterprise strategy,innovation management,and science and industry policy.In order to further explore the possible relationship between the patent quality and the enterprise value,on the basis of previous related research,this paper integrates the index systems and methods on patent quality measurement and evaluation.Then the paper chooses Tobin's Q as the representation of enterprises value and the explained variable,indicators related to patent quality as explanatory variables.The empirical research objects are domestic listed companies in communication equipment industry.This paper studies the relationship between the listed companies' patent quality and Tobin's Q,further enriching the related theory and method system,expanding the application of patent quality in the enterprise performance researches.This paper provides some references and suggestions for work related to patents of enterprises and government departments.In this paper,the selection of patent quality indexes and market value index is discussed in detail,and related research hypotheses and model are put forward.The empirical analysis uses more than 40000 open invention patent data in 74 listed companies of communication equipment industry.The analysis is divided into two stages;the first one is testing the effect of independent variables by hypothesis test model,and the second one is selecting variables passing the test to fit comprehensive indicator prediction model.The model is significant and its goodness of fit is 0.765,which has productive explanatory.Then we use the patent quality indicators to rank the company,and study the low quality company and middle-high quality company in the cases of classification.The empirical outcomes show that the numbers of backward citations,forward citations,high cited patents and claims have significant positive impact on the company value.These are good indexes to evaluate the quality of the patent.The patent valid rate and patent scope have reverse effect on company value,which are contrary to the conclusion of the existing literature and this can be considered as a new discovery under the context of Chinese management and specific industry.Through the in-depth analysis of its causes,this paper also gives corresponding explanations.The conclusions of this paper emphasizes that enterprises should pay more attention to patent search and protection points of claims when they are conducting R&D and patent applications,improve technology in one specific field continuously and focus on different patent indicators in the initial stage and mature stage of R&D.The patent office and governments should also improve the audition and authorization thresholds and incentive systems from the perspective of patent quality.These may have some references for the study of patent quality measurement in Chinese management situation,enterprise intellectual property strategy,science and technology and innovation policy and so on.