Research Policy 44 (2015) 1314–1326 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Research Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/respol Impact of stronger patent regimes on technology transfer: The case study of Thai automotive industry Patarapong Intarakumnerd a,∗ , Peera Charoenporn b a National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), 7-22-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-8677, Japan b Faculty of Economics, Thammasat University, Prachan Road, Bangkok, Thailand article info Article history: Received 26 November 2013 Received in revised form 4 April 2015 Accepted 4 April 2015 Available online 16 May 2015 Keywords: Thailand Intellectual property regime Knowledge transfer Automotive industry Co-evolution abstract This paper illustrates a small extent of co-evolution of IPR regime and technological capability of Thai automotive firms. This study analysed the primary data on Thai IP-related law, regulation, firms’ R&D and innovation surveys, patent registration, court litigation, and conducted interviews for case studies of firms, policy makers, and university professors specialised in the automotive industry. The results show that there are some atmospheric changes in terms of increasing awareness of importance of patent after the regime became stronger. The stronger patent regime has slight impacts on the extent and nature of knowledge transfer between transnational corporations and local part suppliers. Last, the stronger patent regime has impacts on firms climbing up technological ladders from production to more sophisticated activities. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Thailand is not only a latecomer in industrialization but recently the country has also changed from a weak to a stronger patent regime since the first amendment of the Patent Act in 1992. Nonetheless, unlike East Asian NIEs (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore), firms in Thailand have generally failed to catch up. They have been slow and passive in technological learning. Government policies and institutions like public research institutes and univer- sities have not strongly encouraged and assisted firms to enhance their indigenous technological capability, especially in terms of absorbing external knowledge. For example, there was virtually no mechanism to help diffuse knowledge embodied in patents. The situation has not changed under the stronger protection regime from 1992 onwards. Despite significant investment by TNCs since the 1960s, firms have only deepened their technological capabili- ties in Thailand in the area of production. Most have failed to move to more sophisticated activities such as product design and R&D locally. The spillover impacts of upgrading local capabilities have also been relatively small. In a nutshell, there is no co-evolution of IPR regime and technological capability of firms in Thailand, which ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +81 80 4131 0803. E-mail addresses: prpu6@hotmail.com (P. Intarakumnerd), peera@econ.tu.ac.th (P. Charoenporn). is different from the case in NIEs (Intarakumnerd and Charoenporn, 2010). Nonetheless, the automotive industry in Thailand is quite an exception. It started in the early 1960s when transnational cor- porations (TNCs) built their assembly plants there. High demand from assemblers and local component requirement imposed by the Thai government since the late 1960s induced the emergence and growth of local makers of automotive parts and components from the 1970s onwards. After trade liberalization in the 1990s, Thailand has become an important export production base of the automotive industry in ASEAN with strong automotive part manu- facturers. Production is expected to reach two million units a year in 2011, of which more than half of vehicles and parts were exported. Moreover, Thailand has started to be an attractive location for R&D and product development for emerging markets. Since the 2000s, TNCs’ investment strategies have started to change, as they began to invest in more technologically sophisticated activities such as advanced engineering, process and product design, and advanced testing and validation. For all these reasons, the automotive indus- try is a rather interesting case to study whether a non-co-evolution pattern between firms’ technological capability and patent regime still features in this exceptional technologically thriving sector. Our paper consists of six more parts including research method- ology, the evolution of the IPR regime in Thailand, knowledge transfer in the Thai automotive industry and the impacts from changing patent regimes, case studies, discussion and, finally, con- clusions. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2015.04.001 0048-7333/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.