Their studies are wrong – they focus on large firms and not small ones – studies prove patents are terrible for small firms.

Offensively, firms patent to protect their inventions against imitation (Blind et al., 2006). Defensively, firms patent to prevent rivals leapfrogging them. Patents are also sources of licensing income and are also useful for international expansion and enhancing the firm’s technological image/reputation (Blind and Thumm, 2004). Unfortunately, these benefits apply more to large firms than start-ups; Torrisi et al. (2016) for example, found that small firms were less likely to patent or to inward license. Furthermore, such firms face higher fixed cost of patenting, and receive lower benefits related to disadvantages in enforcing legal rights (Blind et al., 2006). This is not surprising considering that small start-ups typically are resource constrained (Agostini et al., 2016); they have fewer financial resources (Hottenrott et al., 2016), less organisational slack (Leyva-de la Hiz et al., 2019) and fewer organisational capabilities (Kim et al., 2018) to exploit patents. Therefore, patenting is likely to have a negative effect on the performance of small firms; thus, informal mechanisms of IP protection are typically used as alternatives, and to better effect (Kitching and Blackburn, 1998). Given findings of a negative (Hall et al., 2007) or insignificant performance impact (Artz et al., 2010; Suh and Hwang, 2010) of patents on small firms, we hypothesise (H1), that start-ups experience a negative effect upon performance from using patents.