Abstract:
There already exists broad literature investigating small and innovative firms in many respects. However, there have been few attempts to assess this group of firms´ propensity to patent or its patenting activities. This paper intends to fill that gap. By applying a new approach to account for young and innovative companies´ patents, this paper avoids an undercounting of small firm patenting, which has been a feature of most of the earlier studies. A data set is used that comprises information on R&D, capital stock, state promotion etc for 534 Thuringian firms in their first three business years. The results of the zero-inflated negative binomial regression analysis suggest that patenting is an activity of science-oriented, cooperative young firms that are conducting R&D even before the firm has been launched.