Essential Patents and Coordination Mechanisms : The Effects of Patent Pools and Industry Consortia on the Interplay between Patents and Technological Standards

This article investigates the role of industry driven coordination mechanisms such as consortia and patent pools in the interplay between formal technological standards and patents. Building upon 64.619 declarations of essential patents to major international Standard Development Organizations (SDO), we investigate how informal standardization consortia and patent pools influence the number and timing of patent declarations to formal SDOs. In spite of the increasing problems raised by the high number of patents declared essential to formal standards, this is the first thorough empirical investigation of the driving factors of these declarations. Controlling for the effects of standardization activity and increasing patent intensity in the related technological field, we find that patent pools and consortia have a significant incremental effect. In particular, we find evidence that patent pools significantly increase the number of declared essential patents controlling for the effects of standardization. We thus confirm results in the literature that patent pools provide incentives for opportunistic patent files. It furthermore appears that informal standardization consortia have 'ambiguous effects on the firms’ patent strategies