Study On Patent Management Modes Of Business Groups

Focused on one or several big companies, the business group is a high-level and complicated business organization form, through which individual corporations that are economically relevant in production and technology are connected together by ways like cooperation, alliance and annexation based on property rights and contracts. Thus it's shaped into a large-scale companies union with multi forms and multi levels in its structure. A number of excellent business groups are emerging with the further development of market economy in China. To take Lenovo group as an example, it has become a competitive transnational entity by companies purchase and recombination and already held its own R&D base and subsidiaries abroad. The larger the business scales get, the more emphasis the business group will place on the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). As a result of this, the number of patent applications increases rapidly in big business groups. Accordingly the management of authorized patents within these business groups becomes a new question to study, especially for those transnational ones who face different legal systems between the parent company and the subsidiaries, which bring about new difficulties for their benefit creation and protection by proper IPR use and management.Based on the analysis of the several patent management modes, namely"centralized management/central-owned mode"and"centralized management / respective-owned mode"practiced in some Japanese, American and Chinese excellent business groups, this paper puts forward two important questions that existed in current patent management modes within business groups: the compensation of job invention of subsidiaries and the transference of patent rights within the business group. Therefore, the patent-trust management mode is probed as a new patent management mode with the hope of strengthening Chinese business groups by helping them properly manage and use IPR from their own situations, thus improving their creative and international competitive ability.