Title: The relation of patent ownership and firm success cases from the LCD Flat-Panel-Display industry

Authors: Frank Tietze, Ervilia Reul, Cornelius Herstatt

Addresses: Institute for Technology and Innovation Management, Hamburg University of Technology, Schwarzenbergstrasse 95, 21073, Germany. ' Institute for Technology and Innovation Management, Hamburg University of Technology, Schwarzenbergstrasse 95, 21073, Germany. ' Institute for Technology and Innovation Management, Hamburg University of Technology, Schwarzenbergstrasse 95, 21073, Germany

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship of patenting and economic success, measured in sales revenues, of eight leading manufacturers of flat panel displays. Our results from a correlation analysis prove a strong relation for a time lag between annual patent applications and sales revenues between one and two years. The results indicate that companies who frequently patent are more successful. Our findings thus do not confirm evidence from prior studies that proved the importance of patents only in long-cycle time industries such as pharmaceuticals. Having employed only free online patent databases, our results imply that nowadays these databases reached a sufficient standard for business intelligence purposes, especially for SMEs that might not employ dedicated resources for this task.

Keywords: patent analysis; semiconductors; optoelectronics; FPD; flat panel displays; LCD; liquid crystal displays; TFT; thin film transistors; market success; patent ownership; patents; sales revenues; business intelligence; SMEs; small and medium-sized enterprises; patenting frequency.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTIP.2009.023269

International Journal of Technology Intelligence and Planning, 2009 Vol.5 No.1, pp.90 - 109

Published online: 16 Feb 2009 *

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