While patents are recognized as a key resource to sustain innovation activities, patenting activities are mainly conceptualized as protective means quite unrelated to innovation issues. By conducting an exploratory case study of French IP advisor, this paper identifies four unusual patent practices oriented towards a strategic management of the inventive capacity of a firm. These practices offer the opportunity to introduce a new capability of a firm, the 'distinctive capacity', which describes the ability of a firm to manage and organize the relationship between its inventions and the prior art articulated and structured based on strategical considerations (competitive environment, legal risks, technological choices). Building upon 'dynamic capabilities', we claim that the 'distinctive capacity' of a firm allows to better characterize the features of a specific knowledge management adapted to increasing a firm's inventive capacity.