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– In today’s economy, intangibles have become more important than physical assets for firm success. In particular, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) registered an increasing trend in patenting, exceeding large firms in the number of patent registrations. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between patents and SME sales performance, taking into consideration also patent quality.

– The approach uses panel regression model to investigate the relationship between patenting and sales, controlling for firm size and firm age. The authors adopt a purposive sampling technique focusing on a sample of Italian SMEs in the mechanical industry.

– The results show that the count of patents do not have any effect on sales performance, while the number of …