Cross-Regional Patenting

Since the samples in our research were mainly manufacturing firms (i.e., OEM suppliers), the manufacturing-oriented characteristic makes them conducting less marketing/advertising expenses. Thus, we held the assumption that the sales of manufacturing firms may not be influenced by marketing/advertising expenses. However, for clarifying this point, we still ran the regression models by controlling marketing/advertising expenses as a percentage of sales between 1996 and 2002. The results were almost identical for controlling and not controlling marketing/advertising expenses. Moreover, the marketing/advertising expenses were not significantly correlated to a firm’s market performance. This supports our assumption that marketing/advertising expenses do not have direct impact on a manufacturing-oriented firm’s sales. Thus, we did not add this control variable (i.e., marketing/advertising expenses) into this research.

According USPTO and Taiwan PTO, the file fees for innovation patent are US$ 1,000 for one US patent and US$ 380 for one Taiwan’s patent.

In our study, 39.7% of the sample firms applied patents only in one region (either in Taiwan or in the US) while 26.8% of the firms did not applied patents in both regions.