Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between family ownership and patent use strategy usingprimary data from a patent survey, and patent and firm-level data from secondary sources. We findthat family firms are less likely than non-family firms to license and more than non-family firms tocommercialize their patents. This decision is not driven by family firms’ lower patent quality orinefficient use of patents. Instead, it is due to family firms’ strong preference for patent uses thatgive them more control over values they can appropriate from their patents. To this end, familyfirms actively search for opportunities to use their patents internally by deviating from intendedpatent uses in favor of commercialization and spending more research time to commercialize evenunanticipated (serendipitous) patents more than non-family firms. This idiosyncratic preference inpatent exploitation may positively contribute to the scaling up of family firms but potentially hindersthe development of Market for Technology.