Do Patents Matter for Commercialization?

This paper estimates the effect of a patent grant on the likelihood that an invention will progress to different commercialization stages using survey data on 3,162 inventions which have been the subject of a patent application. We found that about 40 percent of all inventions advanced to the point of market launch and mass production. Although a patent grant had no effect on the decision to proceed with the commercialisation process, being refused a patent lowered the probability of attempting market launch and mass production by about 13 percentage points. Over and above this, having protection from several other complementary patents increased the probability of commercialisation by an additional 3 to 5 percentage points