Journal of Intellectual Property Rights Vol 22, July 2017, pp 211-223 Commercialization and Renewal Aspects of Patent Management in Indian Pharmaceutical Industry Vinita Krishna, a† Sudhir K Jain a and Archana Chugh b a Department of Management Studies, I.I.T. Delhi -110016, India b Kusuma School of Biosciences, I.I.T. Delhi, New Delhi-110016, India Received 25 May 2016; accepted 05 April 2017 Research on pharmaceuticals has mainly focused on the needs of developed countries while the scenario in developing countries is unclear. This industry is knowledge-intensive and unusually sensitive to intellectual property rights (IPRs).Patents play very important role in their business and this entails good management practices by the firms from various aspects of patent management. Two dimensions viz. commercialization of patents and renewal of patents are studied in this paper. There is dearth of in-depth research studies on these dimensions of patent management in India. A random sample of 300 granted pharmaceutical patents for patent renewal and another sample of 300 patents selected through purposive sampling for patent commercialization have been drawn from the population of granted pharmaceutical patents by the Indian Patent Office between 2005-06 and 2013-14. The information on working of patents has been taken from Form-27 submitted by the patent assignees of the selected patents. Some of the main findings are: a weak but positive and significant correlation between patent renewal & commercialization, blocking motive is the top most barrier to commercialization, direct contact with the partners is the chief mode of commercialization, no potential for technology is the main reason for non-renewal of patents, and enhancement of reputation is the main reason for renewal. Keywords: Register of Patents, patent management, pharmaceutical industry, commercialization, renewal, inventions Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are often cited as the building blocks of a firm’s superior performance. 1,2 However, managers often face the dilemma in creating, using, and exploiting intangible resources that are difficult to codify 3,4 and less amenable to managerial manipulation and measurement. Revisiting the thoughts about these assets as “Rembrandts in the Attic,” 5 scholars in strategic management domain have raised serious concern over patents as a part of IP management 5,6,7 since patents help firms to maintain their competitive advantage. 4 This growing concern is reemphasized at the policy level in India where, IPRs, particularly the patents have been recognized as a marketable financial asset and economic tool. Patent system was established with the objective of developing and protecting technology with a view to incentivizing innovation so as to use the ‘knowledge’ for social welfare. 8 There has been phenomenal growth in patenting over the past two decades, but this surge would facilitate technology transfer and socio-economic welfare only when the patents are worked locally on a commercial scale. 9 Patent management (PM) is a multidimensional activity. Majority of the patents have minimal economic or technological importance as many of them are either not been exploited or are not exploitable in the countries 10 when actually the returns in terms of profit from the commercialization of innovation are the ultimate proof of the success of any invention or new product. 11 Patent commercialization has been cited as the most important incentive for monopolistic appropriation, whether innovations have been introduced in the market or not remains vague 10 and mere number of granted patents is not sufficient to evaluate the economic significance of the patents since the figures alone may not indicate the exploitation of the invention. The lack of information on use of patent is due to lack of data on commercialization in most of the patent databases. 12 Patent renewal is another important dimension of PM. It has no such data issue. The two PM dimensions, i.e. patent commercialization and patent renewal have been mostly studied independently 13,14 except in few cases. 10,15 Managing patents in the pharmaceutical industry is challenging for the firms since this industry is knowledge-intensive and its economics is unusually —————— † Corresponding Author: Email: vinita2krishna@gmail.com