知识产权服务与企业创新活动——以专利代理机构为例

Intellectual Property Services and Corporate Innovation:An Empirical Study of Patent Agencies

知识产权服务业是完善知识产权制度,激发创新活力的关键因素。本文基于2007-2020年专利代理机构和上市公司的相关数据,探讨知识产权服务对企业创新的影响。研究表明,委托专利代理机构能够显著提高企业专利的数量和质量。本文使用企业所在城市非同行业上市公司的异地子公司委托代理机构的平均使用情况作为工具变量,来缓解内生性问题;在替换核心变量、增加更严格的固定效应后,估计结果保持稳健。机制检验发现,专利代理机构主要通过提升专利文本质量、降低专利撤回驳回率、辅助企业探索式创新、推动专利布局并促进专利交易来提高企业的创新数量和质量。进一步研究表明,规模更大、市场占有率更高以及技术领域更广泛的专利代理机构对企业创新的促进作用更为显著。本文发现具有如下启示,深化以专利代理机构为代表的知识产权服务业改革,有助于推动以创新为支撑的经济高质量发展。

Innovation is the primary driving force for economic development, and high-end service industries such as patent agencies play a crucial role in enhancing intellectual property(IP) protection and fostering innovation. The IP service industry spans the entire IP system chain, supporting high-quality creation, efficient utilization, stringent protection, and advanced management of IP. It is also a key driver for China's industrial structure upgrading and innovationdriven development. However, academia has not extensively explored how IP services affect innovation and what factors determine this impact.This paper investigates the impact and mechanisms of patent agencies on corporate innovation, using China's Ashare listed companies that applied for invention patents from 2007 to 2020 as the research sample. Both theoretical and empirical analyses indicate that utilizing patent agencies significantly enhances the quality of corporate innovation. Mechanism analysis reveals that patent agencies improve the quality of patent applications, reduce the probability of patent withdrawals or rejections, and facilitate exploratory innovation and patent portfolio strategies. Furthermore, larger agencies with higher market shares and broader technical expertise have more pronounced positive effects on corporate innovation.Finally, estimates obtained through instrumental variable regression and propensity score matching(PSM) support the above findings.Compared with existing literature, this paper makes three primary contributions. Firstly, it rigorously demonstrates the essential role of IP services in establishing market mechanisms that incentivize innovation. Using fixed-effects models, instrumental variables, PSM, and other robustness tests, along with text analysis to quantify patent application quality, this paper effectively identifies the causal effects of patent agencies on corporate innovation, offering insights into further leveraging the innovation incentives of the IP system.Secondly, from the perspective of patent agency services, this paper expands research on the impact of producer services on innovation development. Existing research exploring this relationship has focused on financial intermediaries such as banks and securities underwriters. Unlike financial intermediaries that indirectly promote innovation through efficient allocation of funds, patent agencies directly serve the creation, utilization, protection, and management of patents, thus deeply involved in the entire process of patent production—from pre-application exploration, patent application, examination and authorization, to patent protection. This paper provides the most direct empirical evidence for the impact of knowledge-intensive producer services on corporate innovation, leading to recommendations for fostering specialized and branded IP service agencies.Lastly, the findings guide the development of public policies and the refinement of corporate strategies. On the one hand, the government should help optimize the IP service supply structure and support value-added services such as IP asset evaluation, transformation, and financing, thus safeguarding and promoting high-quality innovation. On the other hand, companies should outsource knowledge, skill, and experience-intensive tasks such as patent applications and patent navigation to patent agencies, to fully leverage IP services to help enhance innovation quality and transform IP advantages into market competitive advantages.Several insights can be derived from the above findings. Firstly, companies should actively utilize IP services to promote the high-quality creation, efficient utilization, and stringent protection of IP, which are indispensable for achieving sustainable innovation. Secondly, IP service agencies should focus on the urgent needs of innovation entities to optimize their service content and innovate their business models. In particular, crucial channels for patent agencies to help enhance the quantity and quality of corporate innovation include supporting exploratory innovation and developing patent portfolio strategies. Beyond basic agency services, IP service providers should expand their business scope, extend service chains, and improve service efficiency to continuously strengthen the role of IP in incentivizing innovation. Lastly, the government should continue to reform the IP service industry to promote high-quality development. While larger agencies with higher market shares and broader technical expertise can better foster innovation, China's IP service industry currently consists of a small number of well-known IP service providers, overwhelmed by a large number of low-quality service providers. The government can address the above problem by establishing well-regulated and dynamic market mechanisms, promoting expansion and internationalization of IP service agencies, and facilitating high-quality collaborative development in certain niche service areas.