Technological importance and breadth of standard essential patents: A comparison between practicing and non‐practicing entities for mobile telecommunication technologies

Using 23 867 standard essential patents claimed for three different wireless telecommunication standards (GSM, WCDMA, and LTE), this research examined the difference in technological importance and breadth of patents between practicing and non‐practicing entities. We discovered that compared to manufacturers and service providers, organizations who do not appropriate innovation‐derived profits directly from product or service markets tended to have relatively low‐quality but broadly scoped technologies for the claimed standard essential patents. These relationships between the characteristics of inventions and the organizational types were consistently held across different generations of wireless standards as indicated by regressions run for each sample split by generation. Furthermore, the theory and policy implications of our results and arguments are presented herein.