Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Innovation is one of the important drives for the reinforcement of companies’ growth and competitiveness. With the progress of globalization, there is no meaning of the border any longer and invisible competition takes place. Companies make a lot of investment in R and D for innovation and make massive R and D results. In general, they use an appropriability mechanism to secure profits through the results of R and D. Appropriability mechanisms include patents, trade secret and lead time. However, they do not apply for a patent, a type of the appropriability mechanisms with the results of their investments of significant costs in R and D. Thus, this study looked into the reason why companies would do or would not apply for a patent based on the elements proposed in the preceding studies, and carried out a survey with 50 companies. As a result of the study, the purposes of their patent application were in the order of action for infringement of patent prevention, blocking competitors’ activity off and prevention of imitation, and the purposes for their not applying for a patent were in the order of keeping a secret, difficult to prove that the invention is new and easy inventions.
Keywords: Innovation, Not to Patent, Patent to Patent