Patent pledges, open IP, or patent pools? Developing taxonomies in the thicket of terminologies.

ABSTRACT: Recently, a range of organisations, including car and consumer electronics manufacturers, have applied so-called patent pledges. A patent pledge is a publicly announced intervention by patent-owning entities ('pledgers') to out-license active patents to the restricted or unrestricted public free from or bound to certain conditions for a reasonable or no monetary compensation. Despite growing research to better understand this phenomenon, the underlying terminology remains contradictory. We apply an inductive research approach using qualitative coding to analyse 60 patent pledges made by 80 organisations. Based on this analysis, we propose a three-dimensional taxonomy that distinguishes eight types of patent pledges. Extending this taxonomy using case examples, we then propose a generalised

SUBMITTER: Ehrnsperger JF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6701788 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature