Patent licensing and selling to China as a strategy of technology transfer in a New Era: A perspective of European firms

International technology transfer enables firms in developed countries to exploit the value of their technological innovations, and provides firms in developing countries with access to technological and organizational knowledge. This study aims to present a timely description of the experience and intentions of EU firms with regard to patent licensing and/or selling to China in this new era. Firms from 12 European countries in various industries were surveyed by an online questionnaire. We found that (1) large and small EU firms are very different with regard to the number of non-commercialized patents and activeness in patent transactions; (2) for those EU firms that are not interested in licensing or selling patents in the future, most of them are not employing an open innovation model; (3) for those EU firms that are interested in patent licensing/selling to China, IP infringement is still the primary concern despite the recently adaption of the new Patent Law in China; (4) EU firms are most interested in selling obsolete technologies and licensing state-of-art technologies to China.