Patent Licensing in Selected European Countries

The issue of the commercialization of patents, as an exemplification of the industrial property, is mostly considered at the microeconomic level. Patent commercialization belongs to the innovation management process, which takes place in innovative organizations. Such microeconomic research approach does not take into account the phenomenon of the intellectual property simultaneous spread and use of scientific and technical knowledge in the economy. These observations lead to undertaking research on the commercial use of patents in the economy. The aim of this paper is to present the research results of the patent licensing as one of the forms of commercialization in the selected European countries in the long time period. The main purpose of undertaken research was to identify and measure the patent licensing dynamics, which is part of the one of the major research related to identify and structure recognition of patents commercialization stream. To achieve this purpose, the collection of patent metadata for the member states of the European Patent Office was used, as well as the author’s own concordance IPC→NACE table. As a result of the research, some of the European countries were identified as leading, in terms of the number of licensed patents, the dynamics spread of patent property in the European economy that was set, and the branches were established, in which the emerging new industrial solutions are the subject of commercialization with the use of license contracts.