Robert Merges and Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley School of Law) along with Ted Sichelman (University of San Diego School of Law) have just published a series of three posts over at PatentlyO. These concern patenting by entreprenuers, startups, and early stage high tech companies, basically trying to understand how important patents are to these entities and why they pursue them or not.
An interesting finding is that investors might be more interested than the scientists, engineers and managers, that the entity acquire patent protection.