Patented Inventions in Mechanical Small and Medium Enterprises: Does Quality influence performance?

In the era of the knowledge economy, intangible assets become more important than physical ones for a firm to succeed, but they need to be managed, not only accumulated, in order to be effectively used. One possible way of doing this is protecting them through intellectual property rights (IPRs) which refers mainly to patents if we consider technology firms pursuing innovation. Since on the one had patents are costly to maintain and on the other hand small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are considered important innovators whose rate of patent filing has increased significantly in the last years, we will focus our analysis on SMEs. In particular, this paper aims at investigating the impact of patents, considering also different aspects related to their quality, on SMEs performance. The analysis will be carried out using a fixed-effect cross-sectional time-series regression model over a period of nine years, from 2002 to 2010.