From standards to patent pools: SEP-owner heterogeneity and the staged formation of collective licensing

Patent pools enable owners of standard-essential patents (SEPs) to coordinate licensing for standards-based technologies, but doing so requires agreement among firms with divergent competitive positions, technological capabilities, and commercialization interests. We develop a staged governance framework in which SEP-owner composition is associated with patent pool formation through theorized stage-contingent mechanisms. The conditions that increase the governance necessity and coalition feasibility of collective licensing in Stage 1 need not be the same conditions that enable rapid agreement in Stage 2; in some cases, the same compositional feature can operate in opposite directions across the two stages. Using a new dataset covering nearly 1000 ICT standards, of which 57 became viable pool candidates, we estimate a two-stage survival-selection model that jointly examines whether a standard enters the pool-formation process and, conditional on entry, the time required to launch a pool. We find that greater heterogeneity in SEP owners' knowledge domains increases the likelihood of pool candidacy but slows formation, suggesting that fragmented technological ownership raises governance necessity while impeding execution. Business-domain heterogeneity is associated with slower formation but has no detectable association with candidacy, a pattern consistent with an execution-stage friction. SEP-quality dispersion is associated with lower candidacy and slower formation, a pattern consistent with asymmetric outside options weakening coalition feasibility and bargaining efficiency. The findings provide ex ante observable indicators of licensing-coordination delay risk and suggest that standard establishment alone is insufficient for timely commercialization when IP ownership is fragmented across heterogeneous SEP owners.