Book 2011 Chapter 3
Chevreuil, S.; Corbel, P. and MBongui-Kialo, S. « Le brevet comme input dans le processus d’innovation : le cas Peugeot-Citroën Automobiles », in P. Corbel and C. Le Bas, Les nouvelles fonctions du brevet – Approches économiques et managériales, Economica, December 2011, pp. 45-61
Introduction:
Patents are commonly and rightly considered to be one of the potential outputs of an innovation process. The purpose of this chapter is to show that it is not just an output, but also an input, and to show how patents can be a means of improving an organisation's performance in terms of technological innovation.
This 'inverted' relationship between patents and innovation passes through three channels which have been identified elsewhere but have given rise to few in-depth studies.
The first involves analysing competitors' patents (and sometimes one's own patents) in order to check whether a technical solution is free of rights, but also to try and get around protected inventions ("inventing around").This approach to technology watch has nevertheless been the subject of a number of studies (Grandstrand, 1999; Pitkethly, 2001), which we supplement here with a case study of the PSA Peugeot-Citroën group conducted by Sylvain MBongui-Kialo as part of his doctoral work.
The second involves motivation and organisational involvement. Although this function of the patent is included in certain recent quantitative studies (Blind et al., 2006), to our knowledge it has not been the subject of in-depth empirical studies prior to a study within the design offices of the same company by Pascal Corbel and Sébastien Chevreuil (see Corbel and Chevreuil, 2009). We summarise the results of that study here.
The latter had also highlighted a third channel, which could act as a link between the first two: patents can also be analysed as a means of stimulating R&D departments. After analysing these three "channels" sequentially, we outline a number of ways in which they can be used to best effect simultaneously.
In this chapter, we focus on the effect of patents in the context of internal R&D activity. However, in open innovation systems (Chesbrough, 2003), patents also have a role to play (Ayerbe and Chanal, 2010). Patents can encourage partnerships between companies at several levels. However, this aspect is dealt with specifically by Julien Pénin in the next chapter.