Page 40 - IDEA Study 8 2017 Direct subsidies and R&D output in firms

IP protection instrument types Further, we look at the heterogeneity of results by the type of IP protection instrument (for additional details on the definitions see OECD 2009 and WIPO 2017): ● Patents of invention – give an exclusive legal right to prevent others from using the invention in the specified country or region for up to 20 years from the date of filing. Patents should satisfy the conditions of subject matter, novelty, non-obviousness and industrial applicability. ● Utility models - a form of patent with less strict patentability requirements than traditional patents, lower costs of patenting and a shorter protection period. From this follows that patents of invention are more substantial and difficult to obtain. Utility models are less demanding in their requirement for novelty and also cheaper in terms of the fees charged by the patent office. In addition, utility models require less administration, applications for them are usually examined, and hence the protection granted, more quickly by the patent office, and the publishing delay is shorter. It well might be, therefore, that firms rely on utility models more often, if anything for practical reasons, for the purpose of reporting outputs in the subsidized projects. In particular, the “petty” utility models appear quite attractive for this purpose. Figure 4 provides the main results (see Appendix Table A10 for details). As far as IMPULS is concerned, the estimated effects are negligible, except for utility models in the third (t+2) year; any sign that this programme might have delivered output additionality effects in the results presented above was clearly driven by this category. The most significant effects from TIP and ALFA also concern utility models, with a clear increasing trend over time that seems to confirm the suspected strategic selection of IP protection type described above. Nevertheless, TIP and to some extent ALFA also had sizeable effects with a similar pattern on patents of invention, for which the data are still incomplete due to the publishing delay, so the jury is still out on the true extent of these effects. 38