Benchmarking National - PRO INNO Europe

70
BENCHMARKING NATIONAL AND REGIONAL SUPPORT SERVICES FOR SMES IN THE FIELD OF INTELLECTUAL AND INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY
Thus, for gauging the performance of a service, and depending on the service
goals, not only the number of patents filed, but also the value of these patents
as well as interdependencies and reciprocities with other IP protection
methods have to be taken into account. Such interdependencies/reciprocities
arise, for example, when companies refrain – as a result of advice taken from a
support service – from patenting (resulting in a decrease or no change with respect
to the measure “patent filed with support of the service”), and use other IP
protection tools instead, e.g., a trade mark, which would mean an increase with
respect to this indicator. The question then is how all the respective increases/
decreases of the individual measures should be valued on an aggregate level.
All in all, a clear distinction must thus be made for using the indicator “IPR title
filed with support from the service” within a monitoring system and its usage for
performance measurement. The evidence gathered points to a situation where
particularly careful ex-ante planning is needed in order to develop a set of
performance measures that (i) go beyond simple counting of patent or other IPR
title applications and that (ii) are closely tied to the goals of the service. A service
which, for example, has as its goal to foster only the best patent ideas is likely to
take the value of the supported patents and their actual commercial success much
more into account (which in turn probably entails fewer supported patenting
projects) than a service which has the goal of helping SMEs get first experiences
with the patenting process.
Evidence from the user survey employed in the case study analysis
One of the goals of the user survey conducted in the course of the case study
analysis in phase 3 of the research was to assess the impact on the beneficiaries of
the services, i.e., the outcome of the service activities seen at firm level by the user
base. Two assumptions were made: First that a good practice service will not only
encourage the usage of a particular IP protection method, but also discourage
its use if it is not appropriate in the business context of the supported SME. This
assumption entails that the usage/attention levels given to different IPR and
informal IP protection tools may either decrease or increase, and no “positive”
judgement concerning a particular direction of the change is a priori possible.
Second, that the limitations presented above would not make it feasible to use
metrics of the type “IPR instrument filed with support from the service” for
measuring the outcome of the service.
In order to assess the outcome and impact of the services, a more qualitative
approach was chosen by applying the concept of “behavioural additionality” (see
also OECD, 2006). In this context, it was aimed to capture behavioural and/or
attitude changes – together with their direction – with respect to IPR-related
activities which were induced by the services within the supported SMEs. Graph 16
shows the aggregate results for all 15 case study services.
The following observations can be made:
� Most of the changes took place with respect to the aspects “general
awareness” (which increased for 55 % of the users of the services) and
“general knowledge management know-how” (which increased for 46 % of
the users). The knowledge of the patent environment improved for about
42 %. Thus, the three most important behavioural changes induced concern
the IP and IPR know-how of the company.
� The increased know-how has led to a significant share of SMEs pooling their
IPR know-how with certain departments or persons – formal IPR responsibilities
within the enterprise have increased in about 28 % of the supported
enterprises.
� Interestingly, and despite the patent centricity of most IPR services, patent
usage within the company’s IPR strategy increased only with 27 % of the
companies. Thus, a higher focus on patents ranks only fifth, if compared to the
other aspects scrutinised.