How Companies Use Intellectual Property

• Author: Rémi Lallement
• Profession: Charge of Mission (policy analyst), France Stratégie, France
• Pages: 45-60

4

How Companies Use

Intellectual Property

The number of ways in which companies use intellectual property

keeps increasing. At first sight, they may be broadly classed into two

main groups. A set of relatively classic uses can be contrasted with

more recent practices well beyond the traditional role of innovation

protection based on the right to exclude. We can distinguish between

traditional uses that involve defending an already defined area so that

it yields a sort of monopoly rent and uses which are more related to

evolving strategies based on expansion or diversification. Corbel

[COR 07] added another distinction to this dichotomy between a logic

of exclusion and a logic of cooperation. The junction of this double

series of oppositions allowed this author to outline a four-group

classification (Figure 4.1), which mostly applies to patents but may

also be partially relevant for other intellectual property tools.

Somewhat restructured, this classification helps us distinguish

between defensive, licensing, cooperative and movement strategy.

4.1. Defensive strategy

The first situation mainly corresponds to the traditional objective

of defending innovation in a narrow sense, namely to ensure one can

ward off the risk posed by counterfeiting or the infringement of rights,

both preventively and repressively. In this case, the entitled party

wants to ensure that they can produce goods and services that include

the protected knowledge and obtain income after they have been put

Intellectual Property and Innovation Protection: New Practices and New Policy Issues,

First Edition. Rémi Lallement.

© ISTE Ltd 2017. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

46 Intellectual Property and Innovation Protection

on the market, without risking direct competition in this respect from a

rival. There are two things at stake. Not only should we make our

competitors respect us but also ensure against inadvertently infringing

their rights ourselves, as a company that wishes to become involved in

a given activity must first check that it is not unwillingly infringing a

third party’s intellectual property rights by studying its freedom to

operate – namely by referring to patent and trademark registries, etc.

Despite being classic, these considerations about defensive

strategies remain very relevant today. As for companies in the French

manufacturing sector, Duguet and Kabla [DUG 98] have thus shown

that the main reasons behind the use of patents are the desire to

prevent imitation (92% of respondents), to avoid trials initiated by

competitors (62% of cases), to use patents in technological

negotiations (62%), to receive license fees (28%), to reward

researchers (18%), and finally to enter foreign markets. For the

German industrial companies surveyed by Blind et al. [BLI 06],

obtaining protection against imitation is also the respondents’ first

concern.

Figure 4.1. Four broad types of intellectual property strategies

(Source: [OLL 13] and [LAL 14a], drawn from [COR 07])