TY - JOUR AU - Simcoe, Timothy S AU - Graham, Stuart J.H. AU - Feldman, Maryann TI - Competing on Standards? Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property and the Platform Paradox JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13632 PY - 2007 Y2 - November 2007 DO - 10.3386/w13632 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13632 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13632.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Timothy Simcoe Boston University Questrom School of Business 595 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215 Tel: 617/358-5725 E-Mail: tsimcoe@bu.edu Stuart Graham College of Management 800 West Peachtree Street, N.W. Atlanta, GA 30332 Georgia E-Mail: graham@gatech.edu Maryann Feldman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Public Policy CB 3435 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 E-Mail: maryann.feldman@unc.edu M1 - published as Timothy S. Simcoe, Stuart J. H. Graham, Maryann P. Feldman. "Competing on Standards? Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property and Platform Technologies," in Thomas Hellman and Scott Stern, editors, "Entrepreneurship: Strategy and Structure" Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 18(3), Fall 2009 (Blackwell Publishing) (2009) M3 - presented at "Entrepreneurship: Strategy and Structure Conf.", September 13-15, 2007 AB - This paper studies the intellectual property strategy of firms that participate in the formal standards process. Specifically, we examine litigation rates in a sample of patents disclosed to thirteen voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs). We find that SSO patents have a relatively high litigation rate, and that SSO patents assigned to small firms are litigated more often than those of large publicly-traded firms. We also estimate a series of difference-in-differences models and find that small-firm litigation rates increase following a patent's disclosure to an SSO while those of large firms remain unchanged or decline. We interpret this result as evidence of a "platform paradox" -- while small entrepreneurial firms rely on open standards to lower the fixed cost of innovation, these firms are also more likely to pursue an aggressive IP strategy that may undermine the openness of a new standard. ER -