Commercialization and Renewal Aspects of Patent Management in Indian Pharmaceutical Industry

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.