The Strategic Approaches for a New Typology of Firm Patent Portfolios

Patents play an important role for companies to achieve competitive advantage. There is an increased recognition of the importance of patent portfolios as a key to achieve competitive advantage as opposed to any one patent. Hence, some researchers suggest that the true values of patents lie in the aggregation of some related patents rather than their individual worth. In addition, as firms increase their technological diversification so too do their patent portfolios. On the basis of portfolio theory, we build a typology of four types of patent portfolios characterized on the dimensions of technology coherence and synergistic economic value: black, cloud, star and constellation portfolios. Then, according to the characteristics of each type of portfolio, we propose that different strategic approaches should be applied to manage them to achieve superior performance. Further, we suggest that different types of patent portfolios have different effects on firms’ long-term and short-term performances in dynamic environments. Our paper enriches our understanding of the role that patent portfolios play to achieve superior firm performance by linking the management of firm-level resources to value creation in uncertain environments; and also provides important insights into future trends in the patent portfolios strategy in dynamic environments.