Chapter 11: Patent Wars: Staying Ahead of the Curve

With this work we extend the research on radical innovation to established firms’ commitment toward future markets. We used patent filings from 1996 through 2009 from the information technology (IT) industry within the S&P-500 database. We selected the top ten patents in each of the categories of radicalness: novelty to past innovations, uniqueness to present innovations, and impact on future innovations. Twenty four unique patents were collected of which only 14 met the criteria of radicalness specified by Dahlin and Behrens (2005): a patent is radical if it is either (a) both unique and novel, or (b) has an impact on future technologies, or (c) both. These 14 patents came from eight firms (AMD, Agilent, EMC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, SanDisk, and Xerox). Discussing each of these firms, we linked the technical content of the patents with future markets that were 5 to 15 years from each patents’ date of filing. While one cannot truly say whether accidental technological breakthroughs open market opportunities or whether vision of markets leads to deliberate breakthroughs, we conclude that continuous commitment toward research on technology increases the chance of both accidental and deliberate discovery of future markets.