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Exploring the effect of dual use on the value of military technology patents based on the renewal decision

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Abstract

Concerns regarding the high level of research and development (R&D) expenditure on military technology have prompted many nations to pursue a dual-use regime in military R&D. However, the value of dual-use military technology has not yet been quantitatively investigated. We explore whether military technology with a higher level of duality has been more valuable than that with a lower level of duality. We assume that the patent of valuable military technology was renewed until its termination. We retrieve military patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office during 1976–2014 based on their International Patent Classification (IPC) as F41 or F42. Then, we propose three indicators to assess the duality level of them. The first indicator is based on the determination of whether the patented technology is utilizable in both the military and the civilian sectors using its IPC. For the second indicator, we estimate the potential of convergence of a patented technology with various technological fields using the degree of centrality of the IPC’s co-occurrence network. The third indicator is based on ratio of forward citation by the civilian sector over the total number of forward citations as a measurement of technology diffusion toward the civilian sector. Using logistic regression, we found that the first two indicators are positively associated with patent renewal decision, while the last indicator is nonsignificant. The effects of the two significant indicators suggests that military technologies are more valuable when the technology itself can be used in various sectors, including the civilian sector, and can be converged with technologies in different fields. However, the nonsignificant influence of the third variable suggests that the relation between patent value and diffusion effects toward following inventions is not confined to the civilian sector. Our findings provide evidence of the impact of dual-use policies in military R&D.

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Notes

  1. Although dual-use technology includes bilateral technology spillovers between the military sector and the civilian sector, most studies have considered the spillover from the military sector to the civilian sector as dual-use technology. Thus, this paper also focuses on the technology spillover from the defense industry to the civilian industry as dual-use technology.

  2. Maintenance fees are required three times during the life of a patent: at 3–4, 7 –8 , and 11–12 years after the date of issue.

  3. Among collaborated patents, five technologies were developed by Germany and France. For US applicants, 5 patents were developed through joint endeavors with ones in Argentina, Canada, Germany, the UK, and Sweden. The other four patents were applied for by France and Sweden; France and Belgium; the Netherlands and Germany; and the Netherlands and Liechtenstein.

  4. F42B: EXPLOSIVE CHARGES, e.g., FOR BLASTING; FIREWORKS; AMMUNITION.

  5. F41I, F41 N, F41S, F41 V, F42E, F42L, and F42S are not found in IPC codes published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Thus, we consider that 11 military patents that are associated with these IPCs contain typos in their documents.

  6. Among them, 512 patents have no forward citation. Because CIVIL_FCR measures the impact on the civilian sector, we consider that a patent with no forward citation has no impact on the civilian sector.

  7. In Harhoff et al.’s (2003) study, the full model result shows that the coefficient value of the scope of the patent is −0.150 **(p value = 0.084).

  8. In Fischer and Leidinger’s (2014) study, the result of an OLS regression on the price of all sold patents shows that the coefficient value of the scope of the patent is −0.45 (p value = 0.057).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (2016R1A2A1A05005270).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Industrial Engineering, Yonsei University, Yonsei-ro 50, Seoul, 03722, Korea

    Bo Kyeong Lee & So Young Sohn

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  1. Bo Kyeong Lee
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Correspondence to So Young Sohn.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Fig. 4.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Eigenvalue of the SVD

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Appendix 2

See Table 9.

Table 9 Correlation matrix
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Appendix 3

See Fig. 5.

Fig. 5
figure 5

ROC curves of the models

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Appendix 4

See Table 10.

Table 10 Result of the logistic regression for terminated military patents after eliminating outliers
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Lee, B.K., Sohn, S.Y. Exploring the effect of dual use on the value of military technology patents based on the renewal decision. Scientometrics 112, 1203–1227 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2443-6

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