The analysis of the firms reveals that another factor which was not considered in our research framework impacts the firms’ management of their external patent exploitation:the locus of initiative of the external exploitation. An external patent exploitation project can be initialized either internally by the firm itself or externally by a third party. In case of an external initiation, a third party approaches the patent owning firm and makes a request to access certain patents. For the patent owning firm, the external patent exploitation process starts with assessing the value of the patents on which the keep-or-sell decision and the potential price for the transfer is based. Firm 8, which usually out-licenses based on external requests, decides from case to case if the deal could be interesting. Especially licensing requests from firms in other markets are promising options for Firm 8. In case of an internal initiation, the management process starts much earlier with identifying potential patents for external exploitation. At the investigated firms, a starting point often is a regular, e.g., annually, patent portfolio review. Based on the result of the periodical review, Firm 12, for example, creates an exploitation portfolio containing patents for potential external exploitation. The exploitation portfolio allows Firm 12 to structure the potential patents for external commercialization and to offer packages of patents to the partner instead of only single patents.