Patenting Strategies and Characteristics of Declared Inventions in the Long Term Evolution Standard

This study provides an empirical analysis of patent declarations at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute concerning the core releases of the Long Term Evolution standard for mobile communications. The analysis of the declared Standard Essential Patents suggests that the distribution of essential inventions across firms is less concentrated than in previous mobile standard generations [Global System for Mobile communications and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System in 1991 and 1999], mainly due to the entry of new global players. We investigated the characteristics of the declared patents and their value as proxied by the number of citations received before and after the declaration. We distinguish between entrant and incumbent firms. The declared patents receive on average more citations than a control sample of nondeclared. However, such citation premium is higher for incumbent firms than entrants. Overall evidence suggests that new global players in the field are more likely to declare patents with a narrower technological scope and that have a relatively lower technological merit as captured by citations.