A taxonomy of patent strategies in Taiwan's small and medium innovative enterprises

An empirical taxonomy of patent strategies for SMEs is proposed in this paper based on a study of 238 innovative SMEs in Taiwan. The taxonomy identifies five categories of patent strategy - comprehensive, exploitative, defensive, reactive, and marginal - by using cluster analysis. This study demonstrates effective use of taxonomies to map the differences in patent strategies among SMEs by industry, firm size, R&D expenditure, and firm innovation. The results show that the larger the SMEs that developed radical innovations were, and the more they spent on R&D, the more likely they were to adopt comprehensive patent strategies. The R&D expenditure of most of the reactive and marginal strategy adopters is lower than that of adopters of the other three strategies. Among SMEs, firms' patent strategies are also correlated with firm size and R&D expenditure, which supports the findings of the existing literature. The taxonomy adds considerable value to our existing knowledge of management patents in SMEs by making our descriptions of patent strategic groups more clear and concise.