Marketing Intangibles and The External Commercialization of Technology

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between firms patent selling activities and downstream marketing intangibles in the form of trademarks. Although complementary to the innovation commercialization process, downstream marketing investments could also have opposite effects. Trademarks increase legal protection and reduce opportunity costs due to their co-specialized nature, implying decreased incentives to sell technologies to other firms. However, they may also reduce information asymmetries by clarifying the exact downstream positioning of the potential technology seller, thus facilitating the sales of technologies. Empirically, we draw on a sample of patenting S&P1500 companies for the period 1990–2017. Our results show that the more recent trademarks a firm owns, the more patented technologies are being sold by the firm, confirming that marketing investments create complementary value for technologies. This effect is stronger when the trademark portfolio is composed by trademarks with focused product definitions. Furthermore, our findings show that this effect becomes stronger for firms engaged in the production of scientific knowledge and diversified firms. On the contrary, the effect is weaker for firms with established manufacturing capacities. Overall, this study contributes to the innovation literature by highlighting the key informational value of trademarks for the external commercialization of technologies.