The Relationship Between Patents and Firms' Innovation Activity: The Case of Russia

In many respects the paper reaffirms that innovation activity is not uniform in space and time. The paper aims to identify the most widespread types of intellectual property applications by Russian companies at regional level. Three the most widespread types of invention patents applications during 2000-2004 and during 2005-2006 are exposed and analyzed. The first is directed towards innovation creation on the basis of patents. To gain competitive advantages firms use patents to introduce new products to the market. In the second case, firms use intellectual property rights to build barriers to protect market from new competitors. This strategy belongs to entry obstacles making and the protection of already reached advantages. Finally, the third type is characterized by the absence of active intellectual property applications in core activity. The general and particular trends are determined for the exposed types of behavior. In particular, one of the general trends is the reduction of the number of firms that use patents to create innovations with the lapse of time. The reduction is the most considerable for the firms which least tend to create innovations based on patents. However, the consequences of these influences are insignificant for enterprises which have been actively involved in the innovation process and have high professional skills. In addition, one of the general trends observed in this study is the decreasing of efficiency of intellectual property creation by innovative firms over time. The commitment of enterprises to the chosen type of behavior has considerable impact on the efficiency of intellectual property creation. So, the enterprises, which follow certain type of behavior throughout the ten-year period, are more active in registration of inventions in comparison with the firms which have changed this behavior. It is shown that the types of intellectual property application are connected with sequence of innovation stages which pass the enterprises for innovation launch. Thus after periods of knowledge accumulation (the third type of behavior) and innovation creation (the first type of behavior) begins the period of large-scale innovation diffusion. During the last period the enterprises protect the returns from their innovations by means of building market entry barriers (the second type of behavior).