اختراعات، علائم تجاری و مکمل آنها در بودجه سرمایه گذاری سرمایه Patents, trademarks, and their complementarity in venture capital funding

1. Introduction This paper considers the complementary effect of patents and trademarks on the amount of venture capital (VC) funding that a start-up receives. VC is an important source of funding for innovative start-ups (Luukkonen et al., 2013; Pandey and Jang, 1996). However, the relationship between start-ups and venture capitalists (VCs) is characterized by information asymmetries because it is difficult for VCs to evaluate the true potential and behavior of start-ups (Baum and Silverman, 2004; Neher, 1999). VCs rely on quality characteristics to approximate a start-up’s quality before making investment decisions (Zacharakis and Meyer, 2000). One example of such observable quality signals is the intellectual property (IP) portfolio that a start-up holds (Gredel et al., 2012; Hoenig and Henkel, 2015; Veer and Jell, 2012). Research shows that patents are an indicator for technological innovation (Ayerbe et al., 2014; Chang, 2012) and that VCs value patents as quality signals (Haeussler et al., 2012; Hsu and Ziedonis, 2008). Furthermore, though they have been less explored, trademarks seem also to have a positive influence on the valuation of start-ups by VCs (Block et al., 2014a). Prior research, however, has investigated the role of IP rights in VC financing from an isolated point of view. The interaction between the different IP rights has been overlooked. The question on how patents and trademarks might complement each other from a VC perspective remains unexplored. This open research question is at the core of our paper. We investigate how patents and trademarks complement each other in VC funding. As VC financing typically consists of several funding rounds, we further explore how the complementarity between patents and trademarks changes from initial to later funding rounds.