Strategic Worth of Patenting
Citation reflects the strength of herding and organized betting. This increases value of assets. Therefore citation can be considered as a dummy of strategic worth or of the value of an asset. Patent portfolio strategy is also captured through citations. This value becomes more important when we consider patents in lieu of research publications. Further, strategic worth of patents that reflects rights to excludability is often more significant than the licensing values.
Data from USPTO on Indian patents in USA in areas such as protein, polymer, drugs and similar others since 1976 (up to 2004) were considered. We looked for citations to patents in patent applications by Indian organizations and individuals.
Fig 1: Strategic value of patents from India granted, in USA
- Nearly 80% Indian patents did not cite any other Indian patents, and then only a handful cited Indian patents alone. Such absence shows that there are little or no relations between patents filed by even the same organization Fig 1.
- Significant numbers of these organizations are private and corporate.
- The explanation for this may be due to the fact that prior arts from India did not have any relevance. Assets in an Indian undertaking failed to garner the minimally required domestic mass behind it and failing that the value of patents, very similar to the fate of research papers, nose-dived.
- Indian patents appear to have little worth for litigation and turf-protection.
- Only patents from drugs-pharmaceuticals sector received any citations, and out of such 225 drug patents only 30 had positive values of SI (Fig 2).
Fig 2: Strategic importance of Indian drug patents granted by USPTO
NOTE: SI = [(Number of patents from any country citing an Indian patent) – (number of Indian patents citing that Indian patent)].
In this context, absence of citations to any Indian patents from any other country for such a large group of Indian patents definitely raises doubt on the market worth or strategic worth. It appears that prior art from India does not evoke responses from patents being filed later. These assets therefore fail to attain value because of the absence of herd betting.
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