The unintended consequences of crowdsourcing prior art search

Crowdsourcing in patent examination: overcoming patent examiners' local search bias

“…The PTP treatment's effect was insignificant; thus, H1 was not supported. Previous research was also unable to show a significant relationship between crowdsourced prior art searches and the likelihood of a patent application is granted (Kim and Mitra‐Kahn, 2020). H2 predicted that a PTP‐treated patent is likely to have more non‐patent references, and thus a higher use of less formalized knowledge.…”

“…Managers are thus well advised to use crowdsourcing to increase atypical and less formalized knowledge for their decision-making. Further, I have added to the research into the patent examination process, particularly prior art searches, a topic that has drawn very little research attention (Yamauchi and Nagaoka, 2015;Kim and Oh, 2017;Kim and Mitra-Kahn, 2020). In contrast to most previous research, by analyzing the full outsourcing of prior art searches (Yamauchi and Nagaoka, 2015;Kim and Oh, 2017) and thus a paid function, I have extended the research by focusing on the voluntary crowdsourcing of this search procedure.…”

“…It has been shown that information gathered via crowdsourcing adds to patent examiners' decision‐making basis by providing more atypical and less formalized knowledge. To my best knowledge, only one empirical study has focused on the crowdsourcing phenomenon; however, Kim and Mitra‐Kahn (2020) did not analyze how and if the PTP initiative positively affects the knowledge accessed by an examiner, and thus their decision‐making basis and its underlying information. Thus, this study is the first to prove that crowdsourcing in the patent examination process provides more atypical and less formal material to inform decision‐making.…”

“…Crowdsourcing was analyzed in prior art searches in the form of an additional voluntary inclusion of individuals, enabling access to the wisdom of the crowd as an unpaid procedure. The third study, which closely relates to this research, was that of Kim and Mitra-Kahn (2020), which analyzed the potential effects of crowdsourcing in prior art searches. The authors focused on this procedure's unintended outcomes, showing that crowdsourcing in prior art searches led to more requests for continued examination and increased forward citations of treated patents.…”