A Review and Prospect on the Research of Patent Management

With the surging of technology competition, to win the competitive advantage, enterprises constantly strengthen their patent management. Patent research has gradually expanded from economics and law to management, which indicates that the patent management research has received more attention from management scholars. This research mainly reviews extant literatures on patent management in recent ten years, and highlights two important themes within patent management research-patent strategy management and patent process management. The research comments the concept, purpose and ways of implementation on three patent strategies, namely offensive strategy, defensive strategy and leveraging strategy. And the research introduces two key domains-patent application and patent commercialization, within which patent process management actions are typically undertaken. Finally, this research discusses prospects of research on patent strategy management and patent process management. It is anticipated that this review will help scholarship advance some important and urgent research issues that remain to be studied further on patent management.