Do Patents Matter for Commercialization?

This paper estimates the effect of a patent grant on the likelihood that an invention will progress to different commercialization stages, using survey data on 3,162 inventions that were the subject of a patent application. We find that about 40 percent of all inventions advanced to the point of market launch and mass production. Although a patent grant had no effect on the decision to proceed with the commercialization process, being refused a patent reduced the probability of attempting market launch and mass production by about 13 percentage points. Over and above this, having protection from several other complementary patents increased the probability of commercialization by an additional 3-5 percentage points.