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

摘要

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.