Institutional changes and the commercialization of academic knowledge: A study of Italian universities’ patenting activities between 1965 and 2002

This paper focuses on Italian universities’ patenting activities between 1965 and 2002 and on the way they were affected by internal IPR regulations, set as part of broader responses to the increased level of autonomy granted to universities during the 1990s. Our analyses are based on a unique dataset including detailed information on all patents filed by Italian universities and university-level characteristics. Results show that: (1) in the last 10 years, the number of Italian university patents rose substantially; (2) patenting activities almost tripled in universities with an internal IPR regulation, after controlling for several universities’ characteristics, previous patenting activity and time trends; (3) each time a university creates its own patent regulation, there is a 9% increase in the likelihood that universities without any internal patent regulation will adopt one. Implications for university technology transfer policies are discussed.     

Changes to university IPR regulations in Europe and the impact on academic patenting

This article develops a general framework to describe the changes in university IPR regulations in Europe and their effects on the patenting activities of universities and on knowledge transfer processes. Understanding the effects of changes in IPR regulations on academic patenting is a complex issue, and parallels with the US case can be misleading. First, despite the general trend towards institutional ownership, university IPR regulations in Europe remain extremely differentiated and there is no one-to-one mapping to the US system. Second, it is difficult to disentangle the quantitative and qualitative effects of changes in IPR ownership regulations on academic patenting activities from the effects of concurrent transformations in the institutional, cultural and organizational landscape surrounding academic knowledge transfer. The article proposes a review and typological classification of national university IPR ownership systems on the basis of their development since 2000, and uses it to analyze the aggregate dynamics of academic patent ownership in several European countries. The analysis of patterns of ownership of academic patents shows that there has been a general increase in university patenting since 1990, with a significant slowdown (and even reduction in some countries) after early 2000s accompanied by a switch in academic patents ownership in favor of university ownership though preserving the European specificity of high company ownership of academic invented patents.     

纳米科学与技术之间的联系:基于学术型发明人的分析

本文聚焦于从事纳米研究的学术型发明人,即大学中同时具有国际期刊论文作者和专利发明人双重身份的研究人员(author-inventor),他们是联结纳米科学与纳米技术的纽带.通过比较学术型发明人和非学术型发明人的论文数量、被引频次和H指数,本文发现学术型发明人的研究绩效显著高于纯学术研究者,并且在高产作者和高影响力作者行列中占有更高的比例.本文使用负二项回归模型分析了专利活动对于学术型发明人研究绩效的作用,发现专利数量对于论文数量呈正向作用,但对论文质量有副作用.最后,本文给出了相关政策建议.     

Spatial differences in the quality of university patenting: Do regions matter?

This paper uses patent citation data to analyze the quality of university technology across European regions. The empirical analysis draws on a panel dataset of 4580 European university-owned patents classified by 202 European regions over the period 1998-2004. The methodology involves a multilevel framework to identify the effects of factors at three hierarchical levels (individual, university, and regional) on the quality of university patenting. The results suggest that regional factors, such as the level of development, industrial potential, and regional higher education R&D expenditure, do not play any significant role in determining the quality of European university patents. We instead find that the factors affecting patent quality stem from their specific characteristics. We also find that university size does not explain the quality of patents. However, there is significant unobserved heterogeneity at the university level in all models, suggesting that differences in other university characteristics explain a substantial part of the variance in patent quality.     

Have university knowledge flows narrowed?: Evidence from patent data

The rate of university patenting increased dramatically during the 1980s. Did the manner in which knowledge embedded in university patents was managed change during this period of rapid patenting growth? Using a Herfindahl-type measure of knowledge flow concentration and employing a difference-in-differences estimation to compare university-to-firm patent citations across two time periods, we find that the university diffusion premium (the degree to which university knowledge outflows are more widely distributed than those of firms) declined by more than half during the 1980s. In addition, we find that the university diversity premium (the degree to which knowledge inflows used by universities are drawn from a more widely distributed set of prior art holders than those used by firms) also declined by more than half. However, these changes are mostly limited to a narrow set of technology fields (i.e., biotechnology and pharmaceuticals in the outflows case and sub-fields of electronics in the inflows case). The social welfare implications are ambiguous.     

Winner takes all? Tech clusters,population centers,and the spatial transformation of U.S. invention

U.S. invention has become increasingly concentrated around major tech centers since the 1970s, with implications for how much cities across the country share in concomitant local benefits. Is invention becoming a winner-takes-all race? We explore the rising spatial concentration of patents and identify an underlying stability in their distribution. Software patents have exploded to account for about half of patents today, and these patents are highly concentrated in tech centers. Tech centers also account for a growing share of non-software patents, but the reallocation, by contrast, is entirely from the five largest population centers in 1980. Non-software patenting is stable for most cities, with anchor tenants like universities playing important roles, suggesting the growing concentration of invention may be nearing its end. Immigrant inventors and new businesses aided in the spatial transformation.One Sentence SummaryThe growing concentration of patenting in tech centers masks an important stability in non-software patenting for most U.S. cities.     

Heterogeneity of patenting activity and its implications for scientific research

The increasing commercialization of university discoveries has initiated a controversy on the impact for scientific research. It has been argued that an increasing orientation towards commercialization may have a negative impact on more fundamental research efforts in science. Several scholars have therefore analyzed the relationship between publication and patenting activity of university researchers, and most articles report positive correlations between patenting and publishing activities of scientists. However, previous studies do not account for heterogeneity of patenting activities. This paper explores the incidence of patenting and publishing of scientists distinguishing between corporate patents and patents assigned to non-profit organizations for a large sample of professors active in Germany. While patents assigned to non-profit organizations (incl. individual ownership of the professors themselves) complement publication quantity and quality, patents assigned to corporations are negatively related to quantity and quality of publication output.     

The impact of academic patenting on university research and its transfer

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the impact of academic patenting on publishing and knowledge transfer. Drawing upon two separate surveys of academics, and their CV information, we provide empirical evidence for UK academics in engineering and physical sciences. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, our findings show that (the intensity of) academic patenting complements publishing up to a certain level of patenting output, after which we find evidence of a substitution effect. We also find weak evidence of important differences across scientific fields with the more basic-oriented fields showing indications of a crowding-out effect. Second, our analysis of the potential impact of patenting on knowledge transfer shows a positive correlation between the stock of patents and engagement in knowledge transfer channels. However, we find that a substitution effect sets in, indicating an inverted U-shaped relationship between patenting and several knowledge transfer channels.     

Implementing Bayh-Dole-like laws: Faculty problems and their impact on university patenting activity

The implementation of a Bayh-Dole-like legislation outside the US is still a major concern that needs to be addressed. I fill this gap in two ways. First, I report the results of a faculty survey on obstacles to patenting activity in Italian universities, targeted both to inventors and to those non-inventors which reported to engage in university patenting activity and to give up before any patents could be filed. Second, I investigate their effect in a regression model using universities’ patent counts as the dependent variable. Results show that obstacles to university patenting activity reduce to four dimensions: lack of support mechanisms (including insufficient reward for researchers, lack of a TTO, lack of funds to cover patenting costs), commercialisation problems, too heavy teaching and administrative duties, and personal/cultural problems (related to the scarce knowledge of institutional-level patent regulations and to the “open science” mentality of the university). Among them, however, only the lack of support by the university administration reduces the patent counts. Publication productivity has an inverted U-shaped relation with patent counts, but the overall effect is still largely positive, given the current publication levels.     

The influence of strategic patenting on companies’ patent portfolios

This paper analyses whether strategic motives for patenting influence the characteristics of companies’ patent portfolios. We use the number of citations and oppositions to represent these characteristics. The analysis is based on survey data from German companies, which are combined with EPO data covering applications from 1991 to 2000. We find clear evidence that the companies’ patenting strategies are related to the characteristics of their patent portfolios. First, companies using patents in the traditional way to protect their technological knowledge base receive a higher number of forward citations for their patents. Second, the motive of offensive - but not of defensive - blocking is related to a higher incidence of oppositions, whereas companies using patents as bartering chips in collaborations receive fewer citations and fewer oppositions to their patents.     

高校科研人员专利行为对学术影响力的实证研究

当前我国高校科研人员的专利行为快速增长,如何有效平衡学术研究的公共属性和专利行为的私权属性是高校面临的重要问题。以2008-2017年112所“211”高校及省部级共建高校多专业科研人员的专利行为和学术影响力相关数据构建研究数据库,综合运用负二项回归和二元Logistics回归,实证分析高校科研人员专利行为在“申请-授权”和“授权-交易”两阶段特征对其学术影响力的影响效应。研究表明：高校科研人员的专利申请数量与学术影响力之间存在显著的倒U型关系,随着专利申请数的增加,学术影响力受到的正向影响会增加,当专利申请数达到年均35项左右时,出现负向影响;当高校科研人员采用独占许可进行专利交易时,学术影响力会受到显著的抑制效应。为我国高校专利的全过程管理和相关政策制定提供了参考依据。     

Does policy influence the commercialization route? Evidence from National Institutes of Health funded scientists

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical test of the commercialization route chosen by university scientists funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the NIH and how their chosen commercialization path is influenced by whether or not the university technology transfer office is involved. In particular, the paper identifies two routes for scientific commercialization. Scientists who select the TTO route by commercializing their research through assigning all patents to their university TTO account for 70% of NCI patenting scientists. Scientists who choose the backdoor route to commercialize their research, in that they do not assign patents to their university TTO, comprise 30% of patenting NCI scientists. The findings show a clear link between the commercialization mode and the commercialization route. Scientists choosing the backdoor route for commercialization, by not assigning patents to their university to commercialize research, tend to rely on the commercialization mode of starting a new firm. By contrast, scientists who select the TTO route by assigning their patents to the university tend to rely on the commercialization mode of licensing.     

The impact of international patent systems: Evidence from accession to the European Patent Convention

We analyze the impact of accession to the regional patent system established by the European Patent Convention (EPC) on 14 countries that acceded between 2000 and 2008. We look at changes in patenting behavior by domestic and foreign applicants at the national patent offices and the European Patent Office (EPO). We find a strong change in patent filing behavior among foreigners seeking patent protection in the accession states, substituting EPO patents for domestic patents immediately. However, there is no discernible reaction among domestic entities in terms of domestic filings, although we do find some evidence that applicants in accession states increased their propensity to file patents with the EPO post-accession. Inventors in accession countries also increase their patent filings slightly post-accession, both at the EPO and at the national offices.     

Benchmarking U.S. university patent value and commercialization efforts: A new approach

Despite the economic significance of patented university research, it is difficult to measure the economic value of academic patented inventions and observe the extent to which universities are able to capture such value through patent licensing. Moving beyond assessing commercialization performance by simple statistics, we propose a new approach to benchmarking university patents and commercialization performance based on comparative corporate patent value. Our procedure involves matching university patents to patents with similar patent characteristics granted to public corporations, then estimating the “potential value” of these university patents by stock market reactions to grants of the matched corporate patents. These estimated values of university patents can significantly explain the technology-level income from licensing by a leading US research university and the annual licensing income of the member universities of the Association of University Technology Managers’ (AUTM). We find that AUTM universities realize an average of 16% of the estimated value of matched corporate patents. We also investigate correlates of university‐level potential patent value and suggest avenues for future research.     

US faculty patenting: Inside and outside the university

In a sample of 5811 patents with US faculty as inventors, 26% are assigned solely to firms rather than universities as dictated by US university employment policies and Bayh-Dole. We relate assignment to patent characteristics, university policy, and inventor field. Patents assigned to firms (whether established or start-ups with inventor as principal) are less basic than those assigned to universities suggesting firm assigned patents result from faculty consulting. Assignment to inventor-related start-ups is less likely the higher the share of revenue inventors receive from university-licensed patents. Firm assignment also varies by inventor field and whether the university is public or private.     

新能源汽车产业产学研合作专利分析

后经济危机时代,新能源汽车作为中国战略新兴产业之一,在加快转变经济增长方式、振兴中国传统汽车制造业上扮演着极其重要的角色。本文通过对该领域整体发明专利和产学研联名专利的对比分析,得出结论:中国新能源汽车领域最初的研究主体是高校及科研院所,随着该技术的产业化、市场化,有更多的企业加入到新能源汽车技术的研发之中;日本和美国的公司表现出较强的研发能力,中国企业研发能力有限,企业与高校的合作在加强,与科研院所的合作力度降低;企业自主研发与产学研联合研发所侧重的技术领域有所不同,高校和科研机构的技术热点也存在差异。     

Invention in the city: Increasing returns to patenting as a scaling function of metropolitan size

We investigate the relationship between patenting activity and the population size of metropolitan areas in the United States over the last two decades (1980-2001). We find a clear superlinear effect, whereby new patents are granted disproportionately in larger urban centers, thus showing increasing returns in inventing activity with respect to population size. We characterize this relation quantitatively as a power law with an exponent larger than unity. This phenomenon is commensurate with the presence of larger numbers of inventors in larger metropolitan areas, which we find follows a quantitatively similar superlinear relationship to population, while the productivity of individual inventors stays essentially constant across metropolitan areas. We also find that structural measures of the patent co-authorship network although weakly correlated to increasing rates of patenting, are not enough to explain them. Finally, we show that R&D establishments and employment in other creative professions also follow superlinear scaling relations to metropolitan population size, albeit possibly with different exponents.     

Motives to patent: Empirical evidence from Germany

Against the background of the patent upsurge, we first analyse the role of patenting and alternative instruments to protect intellectual property, based on a sample of German companies active in patenting. In a second step, we investigate the motives to patent, considering sector and company size effects. We find that company size matters, both for the importance of instruments and the motives to patent. Especially important are the new strategic motives to patent, like using patents to improve a company's own position in negotiations with partners, licensees and the financial sector, or to use patents as incentives for R&D personnel or performance indicators—these correlate positively with company size. We derive some possible challenges for future patent policies from these insights.     

基于GRU-Attention机制的高校发明专利质量评估模型研究

为能够快速准确地对高校发明专利质量进行评估,充分考虑专利的文本属性和结构化数据信息,基于深度学习技术构建基于GRU-Attention机制的高校发明专利质量评估模型,并通过引入衡量高校发明专利质量的关键指标及权重信息对初始模型进行改进.经验证,结合专家知识改进后的评估模型在稳定性和准确率上有明显优势,能够为高校发明专利质量评估提供有效的理论和实践支撑.     

Commercializing the laboratory: Faculty patenting and the open science environment

This paper investigates the relationship between patenting and publication of research results by university faculty members. Our study adds to the limited evidence on this topic with an empirical investigation based on a panel data set for a broad sample of university researchers. Results suggest that publication and patenting are complementary, not substitute, activities for faculty members. This is not consistent with recent concerns regarding deleterious effects of patenting on the research output of faculty members. Average citations to publications, however, appear to decline for repeat patenters, suggesting either a decrease in quality or restrictions on use associated in patent protection.