Abstract: Patent numbers are increasing year by year across a wide variety of technologies and simultaneously there has been increase in number of litigations amongst the rivals. The explosion of patent rights has found to have negative effects as multiple, overlapping intellectual property (IP) rights create “patent thickets” which make it expensive for manufacturers to commercialize innovative products and difficult for inventors to extend the frontiers of technology.

In order to overcome the problem of “patent thickets”, knowledge sharing platforms such as patent pools, alliances etc. where owners of IP share patent rights with each other and third parties or develop joint inventions have been practiced in the past and present. Patent pools present convincing reasons for firms to cooperate insofar as they can offer attractive “complementaries”. For example, it may be far more efficient for multiple firms – each working to their own strengths – to work together to produce a complex technology. E.g., the respective roles of Dell, Intel and Microsoft in the sphere of personal computing help to coordinate investment schedules and promote interoperability in new product releases.