Concordance and complementarity in IP instruments

This work investigates the relationship between proxies of innovation activities, such as patents and trademarks, and firm performance in terms of revenues, growth, and profitability. By resorting to the virtual universe of Italian manufacturing and service firms, this work provides a rather complete picture of the Intellectual Property (IP) strategies pursued by Italian firms, in terms of patents and trademarks, and studies whether the two instruments for protecting IP exhibit complementarity or substitutability. In addition, and to our knowledge novel, we propose a measure of concordance (or proximity) between the patents and trademarks owned by the same firm and we then investigate whether such concordance exerts any effect on performance. The results suggest that while patents and trademarks independently exert a relevant impact on firm performance, there is no convincing evidence in favour of a complementary role of IP.