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Heterogeneity of Patenting Activity and its Implications for Scientific Research
Abstract
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.
... Por otra parte, la transferencia de conocimiento puede darse por medio de la comercialización y el compromiso académico. La primera hace referencia a licencias, patentes, derechos de propiedad, entre otras (Czarnitzki et al., 2009). La segunda abarca temas como consultorías y colaboraciones entre empresas y universidades (Abreu y Grinevich, 2013). ...
... Por el lado de la transferencia de conocimiento, esta puede darse vía comercialización y fortalecimiento del compromiso académico; es decir, por medio de licencias, patentes, derechos de propiedad, entre otras (Czarnitzki et al., 2009) como por consultorías y colaboraciones universidad-empresa (Abreu y Grinevich, 2013). Estas colaboraciones constituyen una alianza fundamental para las empresas enfocadas en la economía del conocimiento (Ashyrov et al., 2019), en la medida en que las universidades, como principal motor de la generación de conocimiento (Brennenraedts et al., 2006), aportan conocimiento al relacionamiento equitativo entre industria y universidad como una suerte de moneda de transacción (Amesse y Cohendet, 2001). ...
Este libro da cuenta de un proceso de investigación que se propuso, como objetivo principal, el diseño de metodologías que permitieran medir las capacidades tecnológicas del sector empresarial y académico del sistema de Competitividad, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (C&CTI) del Valle del Cauca. Su desarrollo se fundamentó bajo un tipo de investigación analítica que permitió el estudio de las variables desde el enfoque cuantitativo con un diseño no experimental. La muestra se llevó a efecto mediante la técnica no probabilística, permitiendo la selección de una muestra de 119 empresas de la muestra estimada y de 185 grupos de investigación distribuidos en cuatro municipios representativos en términos académicos del Valle del Cauca: Buenaventura, Cali-Yumbo, Palmira y Tuluá. Este trabajo realizado en el contexto regional, se propuso con el fin de ampliar el grado de comprensión de las capacidades tecnológicas del ecosistema C&CTI del departamento. Para la recopilación de la información se diseñaron dos encuestas para ser respondida por empresarios o gerentes de empresas y líderes de grupos de investigación. Este libro inicia con una introducción general que sirve de cimiento conceptual, seguida de dos partes. La primera está dedicada a mostrar la perspectiva desde el lado de la demanda de conocimiento, es decir, del sector empresarial, y la segunda parte se aborda desde la perspectiva de la oferta, en donde se tienen a los grupos de investigación como unidad de análisis entendiéndose como generadores de nuevo conocimiento. En particular, desde la perspectiva de la demanda, se concluye que las empresas no tienden a ser innovadoras, y que hacen más uso de la explotación que de la exploración del conocimiento. Se evidenció también que tienen muchas dificultades en traducir el conocimiento en capital intelectual, al igual que para hacer gestión del conocimiento. La metodología aplicada muestra que son muy débiles las condiciones para establecer una demanda de conocimiento por parte de las empresas, sobre todo en las Mipymes. Este resultado coincide con la encuesta del IDIC en la que se muestra que apenas el 1% de las empresas son innovadoras. Por su parte, el análisis de los datos sobre oferta muestra una relación positiva del capital intelectual, la transferencia de conocimiento, la capacidad de absorción, y la colaboración con el desempeño de los grupos de investigación. De igual manera, contrario a lo que se plantea en la literatura, al analizar la mediación de la exploración y la explotación entre la transferencia de conocimiento y el desempeño, encontramos que esta hipótesis no es significativa, esto se puede explicar porque falta desarrollar habilidades de ambidestreza en los grupos de investigación, dado que esta transferencia emerge más del conocimiento explícito, siendo el conocimiento tácito y su proceso de difusión aspectos que deberían ser tenidos más en cuenta por parte de los grupos de investigación, en el momento de articular acciones para gestionar el conocimiento. Al final de este libro se presentan algunas recomendaciones al sistema C&CTI del Valle del Cauca que podrían mejorar las dinámicas de transferencia de conocimiento entre grupos de investigación y Mipymes y proveer elementos esenciales para apoyar a tomadores de decisiones respecto a procesos de articulación empresa-universidad.
... Por otra parte, la transferencia de conocimiento puede darse por medio de la comercialización y el compromiso académico. La primera hace referencia a licencias, patentes, derechos de propiedad, entre otras (Czarnitzki et al., 2009). La segunda abarca temas como consultorías y colaboraciones entre empresas y universidades (Abreu y Grinevich, 2013). ...
... Por el lado de la transferencia de conocimiento, esta puede darse vía comercialización y fortalecimiento del compromiso académico; es decir, por medio de licencias, patentes, derechos de propiedad, entre otras (Czarnitzki et al., 2009) como por consultorías y colaboraciones universidad-empresa (Abreu y Grinevich, 2013). Estas colaboraciones constituyen una alianza fundamental para las empresas enfocadas en la economía del conocimiento (Ashyrov et al., 2019), en la medida en que las universidades, como principal motor de la generación de conocimiento (Brennenraedts et al., 2006), aportan conocimiento al relacionamiento equitativo entre industria y universidad como una suerte de moneda de transacción (Amesse y Cohendet, 2001). ...
Este libro da cuenta de un proceso de investigación que se propuso, como objetivo principal, el diseño de metodologías que permitieran medir las capacidades tecnológicas del sector empresarial y académico del sistema de Competitividad, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (C&CTI) del Valle del Cauca. Su desarrollo se fundamentó bajo un tipo de investigación analítica que permitió el estudio de las variables desde el enfoque cuantitativo con un diseño no experimental. La muestra se llevó a efecto mediante la técnica no probabilística, permitiendo la selección de una muestra de 119 empresas de la muestra estimada y de 185 grupos de investigación distribuidos en cuatro municipios representativos en términos académicos del Valle del Cauca: Buenaventura, Cali-Yumbo, Palmira y Tuluá. Este trabajo realizado en el contexto regional, se propuso con el fin de ampliar el grado de comprensión de las capacidades tecnológicas del ecosistema C&CTI del departamento. Para la recopilación de la información se diseñaron dos encuestas para ser respondida por empresarios o gerentes de empresas y líderes de grupos de investigación. Este libro inicia con una introducción general que sirve de cimiento conceptual, seguida de dos partes. La primera está dedicada a mostrar la perspectiva desde el lado de la demanda de conocimiento, es decir, del sector empresarial, y la segunda parte se aborda desde la perspectiva de la oferta, en donde se tienen a los grupos de investigación como unidad de análisis entendiéndose como generadores de nuevo conocimiento. En particular, desde la perspectiva de la demanda, se concluye que las empresas no tienden a ser innovadoras, y que hacen más uso de la explotación que de la exploración del conocimiento. Se evidenció también que tienen muchas dificultades en traducir el conocimiento en capital intelectual, al igual que para hacer gestión del conocimiento. La metodología aplicada muestra que son muy débiles las condiciones para establecer una demanda de conocimiento por parte de las empresas, sobre todo en las Mipymes. Este resultado coincide con la encuesta del IDIC en la que se muestra que apenas el 1% de las empresas son innovadoras. Por su parte, el análisis de los datos sobre oferta muestra una relación positiva del capital intelectual, la transferencia de conocimiento, la capacidad de absorción, y la colaboración con el desempeño de los grupos de investigación. De igual manera, contrario a lo que se plantea en la literatura, al analizar la mediación de la exploración y la explotación entre la transferencia de conocimiento y el desempeño, encontramos que esta hipótesis no es significativa, esto se puede explicar porque falta desarrollar habilidades de ambidestreza en los grupos de investigación, dado que esta transferencia emerge más del conocimiento explícito, siendo el conocimiento tácito y su proceso de difusión aspectos que deberían ser tenidos más en cuenta por parte de los grupos de investigación, en el momento de articular acciones para gestionar el conocimiento. Al final de este libro se presentan algunas recomendaciones al sistema C&CTI del Valle del Cauca que podrían mejorar las dinámicas de transferencia de conocimiento entre grupos de investigación y Mipymes y proveer elementos esenciales para apoyar a tomadores de decisiones respecto a procesos de articulación empresa-universidad.
... Patents tend to be used as proxy measures of innovations (Acs et al., 2002), even though their actual values are highly differentiated (Czarnitzki et al., 2009) and the patent owners treat them often rather as signals towards investors and customers than actual means of safeguarding their industrial property (Lai, 2017;Long, 2002). The value of patents can be measured ex-ante (prior to or at the time of granting a patent) or ex-post (following the passage of time after the patent has been granted) (Higham et al., 2021). ...
... The involvement of scientific organizations could positively influence the likelihood of a patent grant, with numerous studies confirming the impacts of science-industry collaboration for patenting (Belderbos et al., 2014;Petruzzelli, 2011). Universities in many countries have accumulated expertise in intellectual property management that facilitates the protection and transfer of academic inventions (Czarnitzki et al., 2009;Geuna & Nesta, 2006;Grimaldi et al., 2011;Mowery et al., 2001). Technology transfer offices of universities are expected to generate revenues from patent licensing, and they professionally deal with the matters related to the legal protection of academic inventions (Veer & Jell, 2012). ...
The role of patent attorneys is usually overlooked in empirical analyses of patents. Using a large dataset of Polish patent applications, 2006–2015, and the econometric model of logistic regression with interactions, the article identifies factors contributing to the successful patenting outcomes. Patents are more likely to be granted for applications filed by multiple applicants, particularly if a scientific organization is involved. Industry, region and decisions to apply for international protection were found as relevant variables affecting the patent grants. The involvement of attorneys was found to be a strong predictor of the outcome, and the study considered multiple variables characterizing the prior experience of attorneys, including their performance, effectiveness, work with scientific or business clients and support for patent applications that were also filed for international protection. The findings offer novel insights into sources of patenting success, indicating that it’s not only important how the patent applications are drafted and what their detailed contents are, but also who exactly prepares them.
... Here, we are particularly interested in two issues: the limits to and opportunity costs of KTT from science to industry, and its benefits downstream in the manufacturing and service sectors. Czarnitzki et al. (2007Czarnitzki et al. ( , 2009a studied the growing importance of universities' unpublished technology-relevant research and cooperation with industry. As more and more scientific researchers became active in commercializing their discoveries, policymakers and academics debated whether patenting as a channel of entrepreneurial activity might significantly reduce scientific output in the economy, with potentially detrimental implications for long-term growth, competitiveness, and employment. ...
... Whereas some patent applications might result from purely intrinsically motivated research, others were the output of specially funded contract research, especially for industry. Czarnitzki et al. (2009a) classified academics' patent applications into corporate patents and academic patents using applicant data, distinguishing between patents where one or more academics featured as an inventor but the patent was filed by a company and those filed by another applicant (e.g., the academic themselves or a university or public research institute). Factoring this distinction into their multiple regression models, they found that academic-filed patents did not harm academics' scientific output, but company-owned patents were associated with (subsequent) lower publication output and also lower publication quality (as measured through subsequent citations by other academic papers). ...
Universities and public research institutes play a key role in enabling the application of scientific breakthroughs and innovations in the market- place or by government organizations. Their present and potential future contribution to the production and application of knowledge to innovation is undeniable.
To further leverage this role, many countries – developed and developing alike – have implemented national strategies to support the application or commercialization of knowledge produced by public research organizations. In addition, individual universities and public research institutes have introduced practices to support these activities, for instance, by including knowledge transfer to promote innovation as a core part of their mission.
As a result, a vital question for policymakers – and the enquiry of this book – is how to improve the efficiency of these knowledge transfer practices to help maximize innovation-driven growth and/or to seek practical solutions to critical societal challenges.
Unfortunately, it is not straightforward for policymakers or knowledge transfer practitioners to access information on what works and what does not. Countries and institutions have garnered substantial experience with diverse approaches. Yet this information has not been distilled in a way that can provide policy guidance for specific sectors or for countries at varying levels of economic development.
With this in mind, the book pursued the following three objectives:
• to develop a conceptual framework to evaluate knowledge transfer practices and outcomes
• to improve knowledge transfermetrics, surveys, and evaluation frameworks, resulting in a standardized method to assess national or insti- tutional strategies in an internationally comparable way
• to generate findings on what works and what does not, and to propose related policy lessons.
... Here, we are particularly interested in two issues: the limits to and opportunity costs of KTT from science to industry, and its benefits downstream in the manufacturing and service sectors. Czarnitzki et al. (2007Czarnitzki et al. ( , 2009a studied the growing importance of universities' unpublished technology-relevant research and cooperation with industry. As more and more scientific researchers became active in commercializing their discoveries, policymakers and academics debated whether patenting as a channel of entrepreneurial activity might significantly reduce scientific output in the economy, with potentially detrimental implications for long-term growth, competitiveness, and employment. ...
... Whereas some patent applications might result from purely intrinsically motivated research, others were the output of specially funded contract research, especially for industry. Czarnitzki et al. (2009a) classified academics' patent applications into corporate patents and academic patents using applicant data, distinguishing between patents where one or more academics featured as an inventor but the patent was filed by a company and those filed by another applicant (e.g., the academic themselves or a university or public research institute). Factoring this distinction into their multiple regression models, they found that academic-filed patents did not harm academics' scientific output, but company-owned patents were associated with (subsequent) lower publication output and also lower publication quality (as measured through subsequent citations by other academic papers). ...
Universities and public research institutes play a key role in enabling the application of scientific breakthroughs and innovations in the marketplace. Many countries – developed and developing alike – have implemented national strategies to support the application or commercialization of knowledge produced by public research organizations. Universities and public research institutes have introduced practices to support these activities, for instance by including knowledge transfer to promote innovation as a core part of their mission. As a result, a vital question for policymakers is how to improve the efficiency of these knowledge transfer practices to help maximize innovation-driven growth and/or to seek practical solutions to critical societal challenges. This book aims to develop a conceptual framework to evaluate knowledge transfer practices and outcomes; to improve knowledge transfer metrics, surveys and evaluation frameworks; and to generate findings on what works and what does not, and to propose related policy lessons. This book is also available as Open Access.
... Most studies included in this cluster focus on the role of the researcher and analyze aspects such as the researcher's attitude towards entrepreneurship (Martinelli et al. 2008), the contextual factors that favor this attitude (O'Shea et al. 2007;Bramwell and Wolfe 2008;Chang et al. 2009;Baldini 2010;Yusof and Jain 2010), the tensions between research and entrepreneurship (Van Looy et al. 2011), and the researcher's motives for taking part in entrepreneurial activities (Czarnitzki et al. 2009;Baldini 2010;D'Este and Perkmann 2011). Martinelli et al. (2008) report that faculties and schools differ in the way their researchers collaborate with industry and that these differences are more significant in terms of teachers' attitudes towards the transfer of knowledge and technology than in terms of the university's policy, regulations, and practice. ...
... On the other hand, Czarnitzki et al. (2009) questioned whether the orientation of researchers towards entrepreneurial activities could negatively affect scientific productivity in terms of quantity and quality. Their work provides evidence that the relationship between patents and scientific productivity seems to be conditioned by patent ownership. ...
The importance and the definition of an entrepreneurial university (EU), together with the factors that lead to its existence, have been widely discussed in the literature. Moreover, in recent years, the EU has also been the target of some public policies. This study aims to identify the different theoretical approaches to entrepreneurial universities prevalent in the literature. Using information from the Web of Science database, we performed a co-citation bibliometric analysis, which made it possible to identify six distinct EU approaches: the triple helix model, the knowledge society model, the global perspective, the researcher-entrepreneur model, the dual personality approach, and also a frenzied approach.
... initiative of the academic scientist and/or her university or in partnership with industry, in the forms of joint research, development partnership, or consulting (Colyvas et al., 2002;Czarnitzki et al., 2009;Lissoni, 2010;Thursby et al., 2009;Carayol and Sterzi, 2018). They may also be the direct result of fundamental research, as it was the case with early laser technology, polypropylene, and recombinant DNA (Hughes, 2011;Martin, 2007;Townes, 1999), or the complement of it, as for the case of scientific instruments (Von Hippel, 2007). ...
... 3 Alternative mechanisms of commercialization of university inventions are not taken into account. Academic inventions can in fact result from activities taking place at the sole initiative of the academic scientist and/or her university or in partnership with industry, in the forms of joint research, development partnership, or consulting (Colyvas et al., 2002;Czarnitzki et al., 2009;Lissoni, 2010;Thursby et al., 2009;Carayol and Sterzi, 2018). They may also be the direct result of fundamental research, as it was the case with early laser technology, polypropylene, and recombinant DNA (Hughes, 2011;Martin, 2007;Townes, 1999), or the complement of it, as for the case of scientific instruments (Von Hippel, 2007). ...
... The TTO, however, plays arguably only a minor role in this respect since most universities did not have a TTO infrastructure at the time the survey was conducted (2003). The ''professor's privilege'' was only abolished in Germany in 2002, equivalent to the Bayh-Dole Act in the USA, assigning the intellectual property rights on inventions made by university scientists to the university (Czarnitzki et al. 2007(Czarnitzki et al. , 2009). Moreover, we include the patent stock per employee which can be interpreted as a measure of the firm's accumulated technological capabilities. ...
... An explanation for this rather low rate is the professor's privilege which had been in place in Germany until 2002. This has been argued to have resulted in a low number of patents stemming from German universities which, as a consequence, leads to low licensing income compared to the USA where the Bayh-Dole Act had come into force already more than 20 years earlier (Czarnitzki et al. 2007(Czarnitzki et al. , 2009. ...
While evidence on the causes and effects of university–industry interaction is abundant, little is known about how, and particularly by whom, such interaction is instigated in the first place and subsequently managed. In this paper, we investigate which mode of collaboration (joint research, contract research, consulting, in-licensing, or informal contacts) is more likely to be initiated and managed by firm employees versus by university scientists. Moreover, we are interested in the differences between small and large firms to see whether initiation and management are affected by firm size. Using a sample of 833 German manufacturing firms, our results indicate that university scientists typically start collaborations with industry, while firm employees would take over the management of projects. Results vary markedly between small and large firms, with university scientists having somewhat higher difficulties initiating collaborations with large firms than with small firms.
... Consequently, it promoted the transformation and upgrading of German manufacturing enterprises. Similarly, research conducted by Czarnitzki et al. revealed that government-provided financial subsidies have a positive and profound impact on enterprise development, primarily evident in the stimulation of increased R&D investments, promotion of new product development, and the enhancement of profitability [31]. Studies by Lin and Ma consistently assert that government financial subsidies are effective in promoting R&D within an appropriate range [32,33]. ...
With the rapid development of technologies such as cloud computing and big data, various levels of government departments in the country have successively introduced digital subsidy policies to promote enterprises’ digital transformation. However, the effectiveness of these policies and their ability to truly achieve policy objectives have become pressing concerns across society. Against this backdrop, this paper employs a moderated mediation effects model to empirically analyze the incentive effects of financial subsidies on the digital transformation of A-share listed manufacturing companies in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2013 to 2022. The research findings indicate a significant promotion effect of financial subsidies on the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises, especially demonstrating a notable incentive impact on the digital transformation of large enterprises, non-asset-intensive enterprises, technology-intensive enterprises, and non-labor-intensive enterprises. However, the incentive effect on the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), asset-intensive enterprises, non-technology-intensive enterprises, and labor-intensive enterprises is not significant. Notably, the expansion of financial subsidies positively influences the augmentation of R&D investment within manufacturing enterprises, subsequently providing indirect encouragement for their digital transformation. Additionally, the incorporation of the degree of marketization implies its potential to moderate both the direct and indirect impacts of financial subsidies on enterprise digital transformation. This study enriches the research on the mechanism of the role of financial subsidies in digital transformation and provides empirical evidence on how market participation influences the effects of financial subsidies, thereby assisting policymakers in comprehensively understanding the impact of financial subsidy policies on different types of enterprises.
... 3. Alternative mechanisms of commercialization of university inventions are not taken into account. Academic inventions can in fact result from activities taking place at the sole initiative of the academic scientist and/or her university or in partnership with industry, in the forms of joint research, development partnership, or consulting (Colyvas et al., 2002;Czarnitzki et al., 2009;Lissoni, 2010;Thursby et al., 2009;Carayol and Sterzi, 2018). They may also be the direct result of fundamental research, as it was the case with early laser technology, polypropylene, and recombinant DNA (Hughes, 2011;Martin, 2007;Townes, 1999), or the complement of if, as for the case of scientific instruments (Von Hippel, 2007). ...
... Examples have been noted of companies restricting the findings of university researchers or researchers denying others access to their data (Campbell et al. 2000;Campbell et al. 2002). Despite these examples, none of the research to date has found strong negative effects that cannot be managed with good university codes of practice (Fabrizio and Di Minin 2008;Czarnitzki et al. 2009;Grimaldi et al. 2011). ...
A common policy goal in both high- and middle- income countries is to increase the commercialization of research findings produced by the public research sector in order to support economic growth. This process involves the transfer of knowledge produced by public research organizations, including both universities and public research institutes, to private sector businesses or government agencies.
A diverse range of policies have been implemented in many countries to encourage knowledge transfer, including the establishment of knowledge transfer offices (KTOs) at universities and public research institutes. Other policies include support for open publication and close collaboration between universities/public research institutes and businesses. One important issue is how to evaluate the success of these policies in terms of their economic impacts and their effect on various actors within an innovation system. Possible evaluation methods include case studies and the collection and analysis of knowledge transfer metrics. The latter have often involved the use of IP licensing data.
... Research commercialisation refers to activities such as spin-outs, patenting and licensing activities to commercialise universities' intellectual properties. While researchers have devoted substantial attention to these activities (Czarnitzki et al., 2009;Fini et al., 2011;Magerman et al., 2015), evidence suggests they account for only a relatively small proportion of all KT activities pursued by universities (Schartinger et al., 2001;HEFCE, 2017). Academic engagement concerns activities including consultancy, contract research, collaborative research, training, and facilities-related services. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the portfolio of knowledge transfer (KT) activities in 162 UK higher education institutions. In doing so, this study creates an index and ranking, but more importantly, it identifies specific groupings or strategic profiles of universities defined by different combinations and strengths of the individual KT activities from which the overall rankings are derived. Previous research, concentrating on entrepreneurial universities, shows that individual knowledge transfer (KT) activities vary substantially among UK universities. The broad portfolio of universities' KT activities, however, remains underexplored, creating gaps in terms of the relative strength, range, focus and combination of these activities, and the degree to which there are distinct university strategic KT profiles. By examining KT activities and grouping universities into KT “types”, this research allows universities and policymakers to better develop and measure clearer KT-strategies.
Design/methodology/approach
The present study applied the Preference Ranking Organization Method for the Enrichment of Evaluations (PROMETHEE) to rank universities based on their portfolio of KT activities. It utilised data from the 2015–2016 Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey dataset.
Findings
Findings show that universities differ substantially in their portfolios of KT activities. By using PROMETHEE, a new ranking of universities is generated, based on their KT portfolio. This paper also identifies four distinct types or groups of universities based on the diversity and intensity of their KT activities: Ambidextrous, broad, focused and indifferent.
Originality/value
The study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature, and more specifically entrepreneurial activities of universities through new knowledge generated concerning university KT activity. The research extends the existing literature on university archetypes (including those concerned with the Entrepreneurial University) and rankings using a new technique that allows for more detailed analysis of the range of university KT activities. By applying the PROMETHEE approach, results illustrate a more nuanced definition of university KT activities than before, by simultaneously evaluating their overall strength, range, focus and combination, allowing us to identify the universities' strategic profiles based on their KT portfolios. Implications of the findings for key stakeholders include a potential need for government higher education policymakers to take into account the different mixes of university archetypes in a region when considering how best to support higher education and its role in direct and indirect entrepreneurship promotion through regional policy goals.
... However, external, in particular industry funding also seems to have negative effects, such as keeping research findings a secret (Hong and Walsh 2009;Czarnitzki et al. 2015). Similarly, patenting in collaboration with businesses instead of the non-profit sector is associated with lower publication output and quality (Czarnitzki et al. 2009), but general involvement in patenting does not impede dissemination of published research (Magerman et al. 2015). ...
Within the last few years, the concepts of entrepreneurial and engaged universities have been receiving increased attention, both from a scientific and a practical point of view. Yet, surprisingly, these two concepts have largely been treated separately so far, although they obviously bear similarities, overlapping contents and synergy potential. Making use of this integration potential may considerably foster both research and practice regarding entrepreneurial and engaged universities. A stakeholder-based literature conceptualization serves to categorize and compare publications on entrepreneurial and engaged universities and is linked with an overview of dimensions regarding both concepts. Thus, this chapter aims at structuring current scientific findings and identifying overlaps in research foci and alignments in research to provide concrete starting points for embedding entrepreneurial and engaged universities. This embedment from a scientific perspective also serves for deriving practical implications on how to align the research streams to provide greater societal benefits.
... The underpinning theory is that expenditures made towards research and development impacts productivity, and that result in overall satisfaction of farmer community. Therefore, the general form of the model is: FS: Farmer's satisfaction, IP: Income Progression, ER: Extension Relevance, FS: Financial Support, PE: Participatory nature of extension, DM: Demographics and CC: Communication Channels.We use a log formulation for the Farmer Satisfaction function, which is standard in the literature[53] [54]. Considering Farmers Satisfaction as the dependent variable we applied Ordered Logistic Regression in this study. ...
... Hottenrott and Thorwarth (2011), analysing the responses of 678 professors from research units in German higher education institutes, find that professors with industry INMR funds publish less, reinforcing the "skewing problem". Czarnitzki, Wolfgang, and Hussinger (2009) analyse 3,000 German researchers and find that patenting with non-profit organizations does not reduce the publication output and even increases citations' impact, but collaborations with corporations have a negative impact on the publication outcome. They conclude that the underlying effort involved in generating such patents distracts scientists from their other more fundamentally orientated research tasks. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the academic side of university–firm linkages, reporting the results of research (called the “BR Survey”, a primary database) conducted in Brazil with leaders of research groups that interacted with firms. The authors analysed the answers from 662 research groups (from both universities and research institutes) to investigate whether the intensity of private funds affects the results of the interactions. The main intent is to answer the following question: Is there a difference between funding sources and the type of results achieved by research groups when interacting with firms?
Design/methodology/approach
To verify the impact of some variables on the perception of the main results of university–firm interactions, highlighting the impact of funding sources, the authors present a Logit Model defined with binary dependent variables. The null value is categorized as a “scientific result” (new scientific discoveries and research projects; publications, theses and dissertations; human resources’ and students’ education) and the value 1 is classified as an “innovative/technological result” (new products, artefacts and processes; improvement of industrial products and processes; patents, software, design and spin-off firms).
Findings
The authors found that the modes of interaction (relationship types) and some knowledge transfer channels, besides the number of interactions with firms, have statistically significant coefficients, so their values present different impacts on the results of the interaction. The results suggest that the Brazilian innovation policy towards a more active and entrepreneurial role of universities is fostering innovative/technological results from university–firm interactions.
Originality/value
The originality of the study lies on the results found that given the fact that private funding sources do not affect the conventional mission of Brazilian universities – teaching and research – university research groups should be even more incentivized to search for private funds to carry out their research. This may be a solution to the public fund scarcity and may help in reducing the historical distance between universities and firms in Brazil.
... After discussing the causes of potential synergistic effects of internal and external R&D activities, we turn our attention to the occurrence of joint effects among different innovation output indicators. Regarding patenting activities, the impact of R&D may be underestimated in previous empirical studies, as a development phase, which is usually a larger portion of R&D expenditure, does not contribute to patent application (Czarnitzki et al., 2009;Grilliches, 1990). ...
This study explores the nature of relationship between in-house R&D, external R&D and cooperation breadth and their joint impact on patent counts as well as technological, product and process, innovations in Spanish manufacturing firms. With regards to patent counts, empirical findings from a Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimator suggest a complementarity effect of internal and external R&D activities conditional on the breadth of R&D cooperation. Concerning technological innovation, results from dynamic random-effects probit models indicate no synergistic effects. In addition, we find evidence of persistence of all three innovation output measures. Our results suggest policy implications in relation to strengthening firms' absorptive capacity that could have long-run effects.
... Therefore, we follow another established strategy to identify patents of university professors (see e.g. Czarnitzki et al. 2007Czarnitzki et al. , 2009. In Germany, the award of a doctorate and even more of a professor title is considered a great honor. ...
... The legislative changes appear highly successful because there has been a dramatic increase in university patenting following the implementation of the US Bayh-Dole Act (Mowery et al. 2001) and also following similar reforms in for instance Italy (Baldini et al. 2006). However, it has been debated whether the increasing number of patents reflects an average lower quality of these patents (Henderson et al. 1998;Sampat et al. 2003) or have other negative effects on the impact of university technology transfer (Czarnitzki et al. 2009). ...
... The minority of inventor-authors, that is researchers with high numbers of patents, also tends to publish and be cited overproportionally (Meyer, 2006). Czarnitzki et al. (2009) took a deeper look into the relationship by distinguishing engagement in patenting with the business sector and non-profit organizations and identify that the former is associated with a lower publication output and quality. Magerman et al. (2015) investigated whether involvement in patenting hampers the dissemination of researchers' published research and found no negative effect on forward citations for publications that are subject of a patent, but rather far higher lifespan H-index for authors involved in patenting activities. ...
Research on the entrepreneurial university has been receiving increased attention in recent years. The growing literature stock has been leading to a rather unstructured research status quo, characterised by foci on particular elements and actors of the entrepreneurial university. Hence, our paper aims to systematically integrate the fragmented literature on entrepreneurial universities. Relying on the stakeholder theory, our paper provides a stakeholder-based conceptualisation. We identify seven research streams and devised an integrative systematic university-centred view on the entrepreneurial university itself and its core stakeholders within its organisational boundaries and beyond, such as researchers, firms, the economy and society. We illustrate and discuss the findings and conclude with a future research agenda. Due to its systemic nature, our integrative stakeholder-based conceptualization of the literature on the entrepreneurial university enables the identification of important future research directions that particularly address the linkages between the stakeholder groups and the overall ecosystem.
... Indeed several papers confirm that researchers with an excellent publication record are also most likely to patent and commercialize their research (Zucker, Darby, and Brewer 1998;Azoulay, Ding, and Stuart 2007;Murray and Stern 2007;Stephan et al. 2007). Czarnitzki, Glänzel, and Hussinger (2009) qualify these findings in the German context and find a positive correlation only for university-owned patents, while patents owned by industry are negatively correlated with publication and citation numbers. ...
... Patent databases are also being explored to analyse the patterns of collaboration between academia and industry. The impact on fundamental research of an orientation to patenting and commercialization has been researched trough the relationship between patenting activity and publication record of university researchers, and in general the results point to a positive correlation between patenting and publication activity (Czarnitzki et al. 2009). This theme is revived with a social network approach (Balconi and Laboranti 2006) and the results support the positive relationship between publication record and patenting activity. ...
... The impact on fundamental research of an orientation to patenting and commercialization has been researched trough the relationship between patenting activity and publication record of university researchers, and in general the results point to a positive correlation between patenting and publication activity (Czarnitzki, Glänzel and Hussinger, 2009). This theme is revived with a social network approach (Balconi and Laboranti, 2006) and the results support the positive relationship between publication record and patenting activity. ...
The aim of this work is to give an overview on the development of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches to investigate innovation networks, in particular the use of social network analysis in the study of university industry relations. The structure of networks can be analysed through the lens of Social Network Analysis. This methodological approach is described and its fundamental concepts are presented. The paper then reviews the applications of this approach on the study of university industry relations. These relations can be considered as an innovation network, in the sense that the interactions established by its participants have more or less defined innovation goals. Different structures in the relations may result in different innovation outcomes, and the use of SNA may be particularly useful to understand differential outcomes. It is thus important to take stock of the knowledge concerning the efforts that have been made to probe the complex phenomena of university industry relations and, in particular, how approaches based on social network analysis have been used to understand it. This work is based on a review of available literature on the topics. The paper aims at systematizing the information and knowledge related to the application of SNA on university industry networks, highlighting the main research pathways, the main conclusions and pointing possible future research questions.
... Papers: the number of academic papers published by researchers in the KCI. This variable represents an output factor (Czarnitzki et al. 2009) from the UBG alliances and is also regarded as an input factor for subsequent rounds of patent applications, new product development, startups, and budgetary support from local governments (Bekkers and Bodas Freitas 2008). Patents: the number of patent applications submitted by participants in the KCI. ...
The theoretical population ecology constructs of commensalism, parasitism, and amensalism are applied in an analysis of the Knowledge Cluster Initiative (KCI), a unique social experiment establishing university-business-government alliances for knowledge-intensive innovative clusters in Japan. An analysis based on multiple negative binomial regressions to confirm the interdependence of the triple helix variables revealed that new startup venture firms served as an input factor for filing new patents and developing new products. Although the ultimate goal of the KCI was to promote new startups from the university, the startups had a commensal effect on patents and new product development. The Japanese cluster creation policy encouraged academic participation and created a mutual effect of launching new university startups. The resulting increase in the number of university researchers promoted the establishment of new startups. These startups had commensal relationships with patent applications and new product development. Although the creation of new venture startups was the ultimate goal of the cluster promotion policy, the results of this study indicate that it was the universities that benefited from the new startups that commensally contributed to increasing quantities of alliance outputs such as patents and new products.
... In spite of the aforementioned arguments, there is also a line of argument in favor of standardization in early research phases. In a related research field, it is established that patenting researchers are more successful in publishing (Agrawal and Henderson, 2002;Van Looy et al., 2006;Czarnitzki et al., 2007Czarnitzki et al., , 2009Stephan et al., 2007). Analogous to the field of patents, standardization activities arguably circulate relevant knowledge and are beneficial for those who seek knowledge relevant to current research challenges. ...
The integration of research papers in standards has not yet been addressed using quantitative approaches. This paper investigates the characteristics of research articles on biotechnology related to standards. The analysis is based on a study of standards produced by the standardization consortia BioSharing. Research, i.e. scientific articles, included in standards is more likely to lead to follow-up research and diffusion over a longer period of time than comparable scientific publications measured by the number of citations relative to most-related articles. In addition, research relying on scientific publications referenced in standards is more valuable for the research progress.
... However, Czarnitzki et al. (2009) pointed out that there are different types of patents, which may involve different relationships with scientific publishing. Indeed, using data on a large sample of German university professors, they found that patents assigned to nonprofit organizations (incl. ...
The purpose of the review described in this report was to gather and synthesize academic and policy-oriented literature on collaboration between public research institutions and private firms. The aim was to identify and communicate “state of the art” knowledge about mechanisms, motivations, and barriers for collaboration between public science and industry.
The review was commissioned by the Danish Council for Research and Innovation Policy and undertaken by DEA, a Danish non-profit think tank on education, science and innovation policy.
The work behind the report was financed jointly by the Danish Council for Research and Innovation Policy and DEA.
For an executive summary, please see http://dea.nu/sites/dea.nu/files/pixibog_uk.pdf
... The legislative changes appear highly successful because there has been a dramatic increase in university patenting following the implementation of the US Bayh-Dole Act (Mowery et al. 2001) and also following similar reforms in for instance Italy (Baldini et al. 2006). However, it has been debated whether the increasing number of patents reflects an average lower quality of these patents (Henderson et al. 1998;Sampat et al. 2003) or have other negative effects on the impact of university technology transfer (Czarnitzki et al. 2009). ...
The creation of spin-off firms from universities is seen as an important mechanism for the commercialization of research, and hence the overall contribution from universities to technological development and economic growth. Governments and universities are seeking to develop framework conditions that are conductive to spin-off creation. The most prevalent of such initiatives are legislative changes at national level and the establishment of technology transfer offices at university level. The effectiveness of such initiatives is debated, but empirical evidence is limited. In this paper, we analyze the full population of universities in Italy, Norway, and the UK; three countries adopting differing approaches to framework conditions, to test whether national- and university-level initiatives have an influence on the number of spin-offs created and the quality of these spin-offs. Building on institutional theory and using multilevel analysis, we find that changes in the institutional framework conditions at both national and university levels are conductive to the creation of more spin-offs, but that the increase in quantity is at the expense of the quality of these firms. Hence, the effect of such top–down changes in framework conditions on the economic impact from universities seems to be more symbolic than substantive.
... Empirical literature on these issues does not offer any conclusive answers. On the one hand, some authors have provided empirical evidence supporting the fact that academic researchers' behaviour, when there is interaction with businesses, is marked by greater secrecy ( Blumenthal et al. 1996) and that collaboration with firms has a negative effect on scientists' publishing ( Czarnitzki et al. 2007), which has been termed as the 'anti-commons effect' of patenting. Murray and Stern (2007) analyse the citation patterns of articles that form part of paper-patent pairs (that is, articles based on knowledge that is also patented), versus the citations received by a control group of comparable articles that do not have a corresponding patent. ...
... Empirical literature on these issues does not offer any conclusive answers. On the one hand, some authors have provided empirical evidence supporting the fact that academic researchers' behaviour, when there is interaction with businesses, is marked by greater secrecy ( Blumenthal et al. 1996) and that collaboration with firms has a negative effect on scientists' publishing ( Czarnitzki et al. 2007), which has been termed as the 'anti-commons effect' of patenting. Murray and Stern (2007) analyse the citation patterns of articles that form part of paper-patent pairs (that is, articles based on knowledge that is also patented), versus the citations received by a control group of comparable articles that do not have a corresponding patent. ...
... Empirical literature on these issues does not offer any conclusive answers. On the one hand, some authors have provided empirical evidence supporting the fact that academic researchers' behaviour, when there is interaction with businesses, is marked by greater secrecy (Blumenthal et al. 1996) and that collaboration with firms has a negative effect on scientists' publishing (Czarnitzki et al. 2007), which has been termed as the 'anti-commons effect' of patenting. Murray and Stern (2007) analyse the citation patterns of articles that form part of paper-patent pairs (that is, articles based on knowledge that is also patented), versus the citations received by a control group of comparable articles that do not have a corresponding patent. ...
Purpose
This article explores whether six broad categories of activities undertaken by Canadian business scholars’ academics: publications record, citations record, teaching load, administrative load, consulting activities, and knowledge spillovers transfer, are complementary, substitute, or independent, as well as the conditions under which complementarities, substitution and independence among these activities are likely to occur.
Design/methodology/approach
A multivariate probit model is estimated to take into account that business scholars have to consider simultaneously whether or not to undertake many different academic activities. Metrics from Google Scholar of scholars from 35 Canadian business schools, augmented by a survey data on factors explaining the productivity and impact performances of these faculty members, are used to explain the heterogeneities between the determinants of these activities.
Findings
Overall, the results reveal that there are complementarities between publications and citations, publications and knowledge spillovers transfer, citations and consulting, and between consulting and knowledge spillovers transfer. The results also suggest that there are substitution effects between publications and teaching, publications and administrative load, citations and teaching load, and teaching load and administrative load. Moreover, results show that public and private funding, business schools’ reputation, scholar’s relational resources, and business school size are among the most influential variables on the scholar’s portfolio of activities.
Originality/value
This study considers simultaneously the scholar’s whole portfolio of activities. Moreover, the determinants considered in this study to explain scholars’ engagement in different activities reconcile two conflicting perspectives: (1) the traditional self-managed approach of academics, and (2) the outcomes-focused approach of university management.
How do intellectual property rights influence academic science? We investigate the consequences of the introduction of software patents in the United States on the publications of university researchers in the field of computer science. Difference-in-difference estimations reveal that software scientists at US universities produced fewer publications (both in terms of quantity and quality) than their European counterparts after patent rights for software inventions were introduced. We then introduce a theoretical model that accounts for substitution and complementarity between patenting and publishing as well as for the direction of research. In line with the model’s prediction, further results show that the decrease in publications is largest for scientists at the bottom of the ability distribution. Furthermore, we evidence a change in the direction of research following the reform toward more applied research.
A major source of research funding for university professors are competitive research grants. With focus on Luxembourg, we present results from a difference-in-difference analysis which show that research grants by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), the central research funding agency in Luxembourg, increase the scientific output of university professors by 31% which corresponds to one additional publication. We further show that the scientific output drops again around five years after the grant receipt. We, however, find that those university professors who realise a quality increase of their journal publications in the years following the grant receipt benefit from a long-lasting publication quality effect.
Biotechnology firms are often created on the premise of commercialising the results of research carried out by scientists with heterogeneous careers and research trajectories. Patents filed by company founders provide accessible information on the appropriation of knowledge through the assignment of intellectual property rights (IPR).
In this study, we developed a new database of patents and publications by the founders of European, drug-originating biotech companies that reached IPO between 2013 and 2018. The founders' scientific human capital was analysed. We also developed a regression model to estimate whether the founders’ career trajectories, previous publications and patent characteristics explain the appropriation of knowledge by biotech start-ups.
Our findings suggest that founders' scientific human capital and professional experience influence the way in which knowledge is captured for economic use. Compared to patents filed by industrial inventors, those filed by academics and mixed career scientists are more likely to be assigned to an inventor's own start-up company than owned by a scientist's employers. These findings lead to fundamental questions about biopharmaceutical innovation regarding issues such as whether risks and returns are appropriately shared between actors in the public and private sectors.
This chapter summarizes the arguments of this study. The overlapping problem between urban resilience and management theories is what factors enable the transition from adaptation to transformation, an adequate modality of governance, particularly for environmental resilience. Deductive-inductive investigation reveals that science-intensive organizations are developing proper organizational and governance structures to allocate resources to areas that will broaden beneficiaries. Though there is a setback of the necessary discipline in construction science, the new material sciences, in overall, have advanced by integrating the elements of sustainability. They are translated into corporate entrepreneurship that is to redefine their technological and economic elements. Common attributes consist of the mimic of nature (environment) and the integration into the design process (systems approach of sustainability). The added science beneficiaries, in turn, will become a driver of urban resilience and transformation. These efforts will lead to a vision of a variety of heterogeneous knowledge.
The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the use of social network analysis in the study of university industry relations. The structure of networks can be analyzed through the lens of social network analysis. This methodological approach is briefly described, and its fundamental concepts are presented. The chapter reviews the applications of this approach on the study of university industry relations. Different structures in the relations may result in different innovation outcomes, and the use of SNA may be particularly useful to understand differential outcomes. This chapter is based on a review of available literature on the topics. The chapter aims at systematizing the information and knowledge related to the application of SNA on university industry networks, highlighting the main research pathways, the main conclusions, and pointing to possible future research questions.
Heterogeneity of inventiveness across urban, metro-adjacent rural and remote rural counties is analyzed using a spatial autoregressive negative binomial regression model, taking into account spatial spillover effects, the count nature of patenting, creative class population, industry characteristics and other regional factors influencing innovation creation. Results indicate that key drivers of invention—namely presence of universities, share of creative arts related occupations and professional services, access to cell phone services, the diversity of high industries, and share of foreign-born population—are common across county types. However, their marginal effects often vary by county type, e.g., diversity of high-tech industries and cell phone access have relatively higher marginal effects in metro-adjacent rural areas than urban counties. These innovation drivers also have statistically significant spatial spillover effects on patent output in neighboring counties. Urban inventive advantage persists even after controlling for variation in levels of key drivers of innovation. The estimated marginal and spillover effects in rural counties suggest that policies promoting technological diversity and communication infrastructure in rural counties can be effective in mitigating the urban–rural innovation gap.
This study reveals the performance of Indonesian universities and institutes in producing academic patent for the period of 1990 until 2015. The study focused on the top 10 Indonesian universities by research performance index in 2015. Bibliometric data of academic patents from the Indonesian Patent Database were gathered and analyzed. Qualitative and quantitative analysis were deployed to portray the recent condition of academic patenting. Several anomalies were identified at the end of this study. Firstly, correlation study shows that no effect of academic quantity and quality research to patent filling. Secondly, the potential of technological-based institutes is not well developed in producing patents. Lastly, invention count on engineering-related inventions are still behind the medical, veterinary and food ones.
Purpose
How does university-firm collaboration affect the performance of both universities and firms? The purpose of this paper is to evaluate university-firm collaborations aimed at expanding the treatment effects of collaboration ambition on university academic performance as well as collaboration ambition focused on the firm’s production of innovation and financial performance for the top 110 US universities and the top 200 US R&D performing firms.
Design/methodology/approach
“Two studies, based on the three archival data sets (National Bureau of Economic Research-Rensselaer Scientific Papers Database and the Harvard Dataverse Network (DVN) US Patent Citations database and Compustat database), are undertaken in the top 110 US universities and the top 200 US R&D performing firms.” The study introduces a theoretical model that explicitly addresses collaboration diversity, number of collaborations, knowledge stock and the endogeneity problem that is generated by self-selection of collaboration ambition in university and firm’s performance.
Findings
The results suggest that the effects of adopting proactive collaboration decision on academic performance are insignificant in the firm subsample. However, more interestingly, the authors find supporting evidence of the negative impact of collaboration on university groups. The authors also find that collaboration diversity, knowledge stock and collaboration ambition lead to stronger firm performance but the number of collaborations is smaller on firm performance. Furthermore, the authors find that collaboration ambition moderates the positive effect of the number of collaborations on firm performance.
Practical implications
University-firm collaboration is a multifaceted relationship, suggesting that the empirical analysis can be interpreted through the university and the firm view to enhance the understanding of the collaboration for performance creation. This study articulates the positive role of collaboration diversity, knowledge stock and collaboration ambition and the negative role of the number of collaborations on university-firm collaboration in terms of university and firm performance. Moreover, proactive collaboration ambition has the positive effect of a higher number of collaborations on firm performance. The authors conclude that policy should refrain from overly focusing on collaboration diversity, number of collaborations, knowledge stock and collaboration ambition, and the authors consider the interactions between the number of collaborations and collaboration ambition on university-firm collaboration when discussing their effects on mutual performance.
Originality/value
This study demonstrates the effects of university-firm collaboration on academic performance. In addition, the authors discuss the factors that influence collaboration to help the firm to increase its innovation and financial performance. Therefore, it would be interesting to see simultaneously how university-firm collaboration affects the performance of both partners.
Drawing upon recent literature, which employs social networks in the field of project management, the aim of this research is to empirically investigate the importance of projects’ social capital for knowledge development in R&D projects. Primary data were collected via sociometric questionnaires on a population of 53 biotech R&D projects located at one of the most important science parks in Sweden. The analysis focused on the distinctive structural configuration of projects’ social capital, among which the roles of network diversity were emphasized. Our results suggest that certain structural configurations of project social capital maximize the level of effectiveness in knowledge development. More specifically, we found an inverted U-shaped relationship between projects’ network diversity and their level of knowledge development, demonstrating that intermediate levels of diversity maximize project knowledge development. Implications for innovation managers and policymakers are discussed.
The creation of spin-off companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. In the promotion process, policymakers typically treat these “university” spin-offs like industry start-ups. However, when university spin-offs involve an employment transition by a researcher from the not-for-profit sector, the creation of a university spin-off is likely to impose a higher social cost than the creation of an industry start-up. To offset this higher social cost, university spin-offs must produce a larger stream of social benefits than industry start-ups, a performance premium. This paper outlines the arguments explaining why the social costs of entrepreneurship are likely to be higher for academic entrepreneurs, and empirically investigates the existence of a performance premium using a sample of German start-up companies. We find that university spin-offs exhibit a performance premium of 3.4 % points higher employment growth over industry start-ups. The analysis also shows that the performance premium varies across types of academic entrepreneurs and founders’ academic disciplines. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York (Outside the USA) 2014
The paper addresses the rising criticism to innovation policies that have assumed a direct and massive impact of universities in regional economies. It integrates the literature in economics of innovation, higher education, economic geography and regional studies. The paper shows why research excellence is considered a necessary condition for regional impact, why it is not sufficient, and whether there are substitutes. The Additional Material section includes an analysis, based on original data, on research excellence in universities in European peripheral regions. The policy implications call for a new approach to the role of universities.
We use an exogenous change in German Federal law to examine how entrepreneurial support and the ownership of patent rights influence academic entrepreneurship. In 2002, the German Federal Government enacted a major reform called Knowledge Creates Markets that set up new infrastructure to facilitate university-industry technology transfer and shifted the ownership of patent rights from university researchers to their universities. Based on a novel researcher-level panel database that includes a control group not affected by the policy change, we find no evidence that the new infrastructure resulted in an increase in start-up companies by university researchers. The shift in patent rights may have strengthened the relationship between patents on university-discovered inventions and university start-ups; however, it substantially decreased the volume of patents with the largest decrease taking place in faculty-firm patenting relationships.
University-level institutions are an important source of innovations. However, there are a lot of inventions of academics at German universities, which are not transferred into a commercial use. Therefore we analyzed how academics' characteristics, working conditions, and the institu-tional context affect the likelihood to innovate and commercialize their inventions. Our results show that scientists, who are male, work full-time, do applied or multi-disciplinary research with a secondary employment innovate more often. To commercially exploit their inventions, we no longer find a gender effect but higher levels of professional experience and distinct human capital resources facilitating this step of innovation activity.
This paper addresses two questions: First, what is the relationship between traditional modes of university-industry linkages (UIL) and scientific productivity in the case of Mexican academic researchers? And second, what is the correlation of those traditional modes of UIL with the quality of the scientific output? To answer this questions, the paper starts by putting forward the ongoing debate on the possibility of a trade-off effect between UIL and scientific productivity. Afterwards, based on the scientific and technical human capital approach it builds a conceptual framework. The paper uses a survey of 287 academic researchers from five different fields of knowledge. The outcomes of a set of Generalized Linear Models (GLM) suggest that traditional modes of UIL have a dissimilar influence on scientific productivity. While consultancy and joint research projects showed impact on scientific publishing, training and research contracts seem no to have any notable effect. When using number of citations as dependent variable, only the mode of joint research projects presented significant and positive influence. The results also indicate a quite different pattern regarding the diverse fields of knowledge. Concerning professional activity of researcher, we found consistent results in all econometric estimations. The
Citation and referencing data from recent biotechnology patents and bioscience papers is used to show that the bibliometric properties in these two realms are quite similar. Specifically, it is shown that the time distribution of references from both patents and papers are similar, with peak citing at two to four years prior to publication or issue. This is shown to hold for patents citing patents, for papers citing papers, and for patents citing papers. Furthermore, it is shown that there is a very skewed distribution of cited material in both patents and papers, with a relatively small number of highly cited patents and papers, and a relatively large number of documents which are cited only once or twice, or not at all. Finally, it is shown that there is a substantial amount of citation from biotechnology patents to the central scientific literature. We conclude from this that science and technology are far more closely linked today than is normally perceived, and that, in fact, the division between leading edge biotechnology and modern bioscience has alsmot completely disappeared.
The present paper focuses on some important requirements for understanding patent search reports in view of their use for statistical analysis. It is pointed out and illustrated that the comprehensiveness and the quality of a given search report may vary significantly as a function of the patent office drawing up the report. These differences imply consequences with respect to the safe use and interpretation of the data. The authors stress that a sound analysis based on patent citation data can only be performed in a meaningful way if the analyst has a minimum knowledge of the underlying search reports.
The growing importance of technology-relevant non-publication output of university research has come into the focus of policy-makers'
interest. A fierce debate arose on possible negative consequences of the increasing commercialization of science, as it may
come with a reduction in research performance. This paper investigates the relationship between publishing as a measure of
scientific output and patenting for German professors active in a range of science fields. We combine bibliometric/technometric
indicators and econometric techniques to show that patenting positively correlates with the publication output and quality
of patenting researchers.
A small sample of 38 Advanced Technology Projects funded between 1993 and 1996 are surveyed to explore the reasons for university non-participation, or, in the cases where they did participate, whether the partnerships encountered any difficulties from their participation. 32 percent report that intellectual property issues were an insurmountable barrier to university participation. Such barriers are more likely when the ATP share of funding is high and when the expected duration of the research is relatively short. They are also somewhat more likely for projects involving chemical technology, and when industrial participants have had previous experience with universities as research partners. These difficulties over IP may arise because the cultures in the two institutional forms differ, or because the original ATP guidelines do not recognize the existence of the Bayh-Dole Act (which grants universities title to inventions made by their employees using outside funding).
The Impact Factor introduced by Eugene Garfield is a fundamental citation-based measure for significance and performance of
scientific journals. It is perhaps the most popular bibliometric product used in bibliometrics itself, as well as outside
the scientific community. First, a concise review of the background and history of the ISI impact factor and the basic ideas
underlying it are given. A cross-citation matrix is used to visualise the construction of the Impact Factor and several related
journal citation measures.Both strengths and flaws of the impact factor are discussed. Several attempts made by different authors to introduce more
sophisticated journal citation measures and the reasons why many indicators aiming at a correction of methodological limitations
of the Impact Factor were not successful are described. The next section is devoted to the analysis of basic technical and
methodological aspects. In this context, the most important sources of possible biases and distortions for calculation and
use of journal citation measures are studied. Thereafter, main characteristics of application contexts are summarised. The
last section is concerned with questions of statistical reliability of journal citation measures. It is shown that in contrast
to a common misbelief statistical methods can be applied to discrete "skewed" distributions, and that the statistical reliability
of these statistics can be used as a basis for application of journal impact measures in comparative analyses. Finally, the
question of sufficiency or insufficiency of a single, howsoever complex measure for characterising the citation impact of
scientific journals is discussed.
This paper explores the relationship between scientific publication and patenting activity. More specifically, it examines for the field of nano-science and nano-technology whether researchers who both publish and patent are more productive and more highly cited than their peers who concentrate on scholarly publication in communicating their research results. This study is based on an analysis of the nano-science publications and nano-technology patents of a small set of European countries. While only a very few nano-scientists appear to hold patents in nano-technology, many nano-inventors seem to be actively publishing nano-science research. Overall, the patenting scientists appear to outperform their solely publishing (non-inventing) peers in terms of publication counts and citation frequency. However, a closer examination of the highly active and highly cited nano-authors points to a slightly different situation. While still over-represented among the highly cited authors, inventor-authors appear not to be among the most highly cited authors in that category, with a single notable exception. One policy implication is that, generally speaking, patenting activity does not appear to have an adverse impact on the publication and citation performance of researchers.
This paper reports on a new approach to study the linkage between science and technology. Unlike most contributions to this area we do not trace citations of scientific literature in patents but explore citations of patents in scientific literature. Our analysis is based on papers recorded in the 1996-2000 annual volumes of the CD-Edition of Science Citation Index (SCI) of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and patent data provided by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Almost 30,000 US patents were cited by scientific research papers. We analysed the citation links by scientific fields and technological sectors. Chemistry-related subfields tended to cite patents more than other scientific area. Among technological sectors, chemical clearly dominates followed by drugs and medical patents as the most frequently cited categories. Further analyses included a country-ranking based on inventor-addresses of the cited patents, a more detailed inspection of the ten most cited patents, and an analysis of class-field transfers. The paper concludes with the suggestions for future research. One of them is to compare our 'reverse' citation data with 'regular' patent citation data within the same classification system to see whether citations occur, irrespectively of their directionality, in the same fields of science and technology. Another question is as to how one should interpret reverse citation linkages.
The growing importance of technology relevant non-publication output of university research has come into the focus of policy-makers? interest. A fierce debate arose on possible negative consequences of the increasing commercialization of science, as it may come along with a reduction in research performance. This paper investigates the relationship between publishing as a measure of scientific output and patenting for German professors active in a range of science fields. We combine bibliometric/technometric indicators and econometric techniques to show that patenting positively correlates with, first, the publication output and, second, with publication quality of patenting researchers.
Through a survey, private economic value estimates were obtained on 964 inventions made in the United States and Germany and on which German patent renewal fees were paid to full-term expiration in 1995. A search of subsequent U.S. and German patents yielded counts of citations to those patents. Patents renewed to full-term were significantly more highly cited than patents allowed to expire before their full term. The higher an invention's economic value estimate was, the more the patent was subsequently cited. © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
This paper explores the recent explosion in university patenting as a source of insight into the changing relationship between the university and the private sector. Before the mid-1980s, university patents were more highly cited, and were cited by more diverse patents, than a random sample of all patents. More recently several significant shifts in university patenting behavior have led to the disappearance of this difference. Thus our results suggest that between 1965 and 1988 the rate of increase of important patents from universities was much less than their overall rate of increase of patenting. © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
We use the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to examine the question of who in US universities is patenting. Because standard methods of estimation are not directly applicable, we use a zero-inflated negative binomial model to estimate the patent equation, using instruments for the number of articles to avoid problems of endogeneity. We also estimate the patent model using the generalized method of moments estimation of count data models with endogenous regressors. We find work context and field to be important predictors of the number of patent applications. We also find patents to be positively and significantly related to the number of publications. This finding is robust to the choice of instruments and method of estimation. The cross-sectional nature of the data preclude an examination of whether a trade-off exists between publishing and patenting, holding individual characteristics constant over time. But the strong cross-sectional correlation that we find does not suggest that commercialization has come at the expense of placing knowledge in the public domain.
The identification of age, cohort (vintage), and period (year) effects in a panel of individuals or other units is an old problem in the social sciences, but one that has not been much studied in the context of measuring researcher productivity. In the context of a semi-parametric model of productivity, where these effects are assumed to enter in an additive manner, we present the conditions necessary to identify and test for the presence of the three effects. In particular, we show that failure to specify, precisely, the conditions under which such a model is identified can lead to misleading conclusions about the productivity-age relationship. We illustrate our methods using data on the publications 1986-1997 by 465 French condensed-matter physicists who were born between 1936 and 1960.
Declining research productivity with age is implied by economic models of life-cycle human capital investment but is denied
by some recent empirical studies. The purpose of the present study is to provide new evidence on whether a scientist's output
generally declines with advancing age. A longitudinal data set has been compiled for scientists and mathematicians at six
major departments, including data on age, salaries, annual citations (stock of human capital), citations to current output
(flow of human capital), and quantity of current output measured both in number of articles and in number of pages. Analysis
of the data indicates that salaries peak from the early to mid-60s, whereas annual citations appear to peak from age 39 to
89 for different departments with a mean age of 59 for the 6 departments. The quantity and quality of current research output
appear to decline continuously with age.
Using patent data from the European Patent Office combined with firm-level data, we evaluate the contribution of science linkages
to the innovation performance of a firm at the patent level. We examine the effect of (i) firm-level linkages to science (firms
active in publication and co-publication), and (ii) invention-specific linkages (patents with citations to scientific publications)
on patent quality measures. Our results suggest that citations to scientific publications are not significant in explaining
forward citations but are positively related to the scope of forward citations. Our main finding is that the linkage to science
at the firm level matters more for forward citations than the linkage at the invention/patent level. In particular, nonscience-related
patents of firms with firm level scientific linkages are more frequently, more broadly, and more quickly cited than comparable
patents of firms without these science linkages.
We examine the influence of faculty patenting on the rate, quality, and
content of public research outputs in a panel dataset of 3,862 academic
life scientists. Using inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTW) to
account for self-selection into patenting, we find that patenting has a
positive effect on the rate of publications and a weak positive effect on
the quality of these publications. We also find that patenters may be
shifting their research focus to questions of commercial interest. We
conclude that the often voiced concern that patenting in academe has a
nefarious effect on public research output is misplaced.
In the economics of science framework, many empirical studies have exhibited the persistence of the productivity hierarchies over the life cycle for a cohort of academic scientists. In this paper, we identify rewards in science which may contribute to this persistence and assess their impact on researcher's productivity relative to the influence of individual observed variables (age, gender and education). We have built an unique panel database that concerns French physicists over 1980-1997 and estimate an econometric model that controls for individual unobserved variables and allows time- stable variables. It is an issue for science policy, since the two effects - that of the rewards variables and that of the individual observed variables- are controlled with different tools. The first effect depends on the incentive scheme at work in the scientific institution, and the second effect depends on the recruitment policy in academic research. We consider three measures of productivity: the number of articles and the quality of the publications assessed both by the number of citations and by the journals impact factor.
Abstract—This paper explores the recent explosion in university patenting as a source of insight into the changing,relationship between,the university and the private sector. Before the mid-1980s, university patents were more highly cited, and were cited by more diverse patents, than a random sample of all patents. More,recently several significant shifts in university patenting behavior have led to the disappearance,of this difference. Thus our results suggest that between,1965 and 1988 the rate of increase of important patents from universities was much,less than their overall rate of increase of patenting.
DuPont's citation and co-authoring links are tabulated and displayed in an exploration of the possibilities and problems inherent
in a ‘360 degree’ citation analysis. It becomes apparent that to produce this type of analysis regularly demands a high level
of database infrastructure. The analysis makes visible the interconnected nature of scientific and technological developments
and the web-like structure of the research world.
In this paper we explore the degree to which patents are representative of the magnitude, direction, and impact of the knowledge spilling out of the university by focusing on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in particular, on the Departments of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, we show that patenting is a minority activity: a majority of the faculty in our sample never patent, and publication rates far outstrip patenting rates. Most faculty members estimate that patents account for less than 10% of the knowledge that transfers from their labs. Our results also suggest that in two important ways patenting is not representative of the patterns of knowledge generation and transfer from MIT: patent volume does not predict publication volume, and those firms that cite MIT papers are in general not the same firms as those that cite MIT patents. However, patent volume is positively correlated with paper citations, suggesting that patent counts may be reasonable measures of research impact. We close by speculating on the implications of our results for the difficult but important question of whether, in this setting, patenting acts as a substitute or a complement to the process of fundamental research.
This paper is an attempt to quantify key aspects of innovations, 'basicness' and appropriability, and explore the linkages between them. We rely on detailed patent data. particularly on patent citations, thus awarding the proposed measures a very wide coverage. Relying on the prior that universities perform more basic research than corporations, we find that forward-looking measures of 'importance' and 'generality' capture aspects of the basicness of innovations. Similarly, measures of the degree of reliance on scientific sources. and of the closeness to the origins of innovational paths, appear to reflect the basicness of research. As measures of appropriability we use the fraction of citations coming from patents awarded to the sarne inventor, and in fact these measures are much higher for corporations than fbr universities. An examination of a small number of patents that are universally recognized as 'basic' provides further support for these measures. We find also evidence of the existence of 'technologl trajectories'.
The aim of this study is to investigate a specific aspect of the science and technology interface: inventor-author relations. The subject area is application of lasers in medicine. The empirical material consists of a set of 30 patents, representing the ‘technology side’ and 1057 publications authored by the inventors, representing the ‘science side’ of lasers in medicine.Our study includes four different approaches. First, we tried to find evidence, by looking at the scientific part, for the claim that references in patents to non-patent literature (NPL references, mostly scientific publications) indicate ‘science intensity’. It appeared that inventors of patents with many NPL references did not publish significantly more in science than inventors of patents with few NPL references. The former did, however, use more basic scientific journals to publish in than the latter.Second, we tried to identify at the science side one paper per patent which would best represent the R&D activities related to the patent. Here, a weak correlation was found between the number of NPL references in the patents and the number of references in their scientific counterparts.In our third approach, we compared the number of NPL references in the patents with expert assessments about the science intensity of each individual patent. Moreover, other aspects were taken in consideration, such as legal status of a patent (number of claims), complexity of the invention (number of pages), size of the inventor team. We found out that some of these other aspects could be related to a higher number of NPL references in patents.In the fourth and final approach of the study, we analysed the inventors' publications in more detail, in particular for the period before and around the patent application date. We tested and found evidence for two hypotheses. These two hypotheses state that, in preparation of a patent application, (1) co-inventors increase their co-activity in science; and (2) companies and universities level up their co-operation.
This paper summarizes the results of empirical analyses of data on the characteristics of the pre- and post-1980 patents of three leading US academic patenters—the University of California, Stanford University, and Columbia University. We complement the analysis of these institutions with an analysis of the characteristics of the patents issued to all US universities before and after 1980. Our analysis suggests that the effects of the Bayh–Dole act on the content of academic research and patenting at Stanford and the University of California were modest. The most significant change in the content of research at these universities, one associated with increased patenting and licensing at both universities before and after 1980, was the rise of biomedical research and inventive activity, but Bayh–Dole had little to do with this growth. Both UC and Stanford University administrators intensified their efforts to market faculty inventions in the wake of Bayh–Dole. This enlargement of the pool of marketed inventions appears to have reduced the commercial “yield” of this population at both universities. But we find no decline in the “importance” or “generality” of the post-1980 patents of these two universities. The analysis of overall US university patenting suggests that the patents issued to institutions that entered into patenting and licensing after the effective date of the Bayh–Dole act are indeed less important and less general than the patents issued before and after 1980 to US universities with longer experience in patenting. Inexperienced academic patenters appear to have obtained patents that proved to be less significant (in terms of the rate and breadth of their subsequent citations) than those issuing to more experienced university patenters. Bayh–Dole’s effects on entry therefore may be as important as any effects of the act on the internal “research culture” of US universities in explaining any decline in the importance and generality of US academic patents after 1980.
Do financial returns to licensing divert faculty from basic research? In a life cycle model in which faculty can conduct basic and/or applied research (the latter can be licensed) licensing increases applied relative to basic effort. However, leisure falls so basic research need not suffer. If applied effort also leads to publishable output, then research output and stock of knowledge are higher with licensing than without. In a tenure system licensing has a positive effect on research output unless license incentives are high. Overall results suggest a positive impact of tenure on research output over the life cycle.
This paper studies distribution-free estimation of some multiplicative unobserved components panel data models. One class of estimators requires only specification of the conditional mean; in particular, the multinomial quasi-conditional maximum likelihood estimator is shown to be consistent when only the conditional mean in the unobserved effects model is correctly specified. Additional orthogonality conditions can be used in a method of moments framework. A second class of problems specifies the conditional mean, conditional variances, and conditional covariances. Using the notion of a conditional linear predictor, it is shown that specification of conditional second moments implies further orthogonality conditions in the observable data that can be exploited for efficiency gains. This has applications to both count and gamma-type panel data regression models.
The question of exactly how science is commercialized is an important one. While the social structures of “science” and “technology” are distinctive, recent work suggests that scientific and technological ideas in fact co-evolve. This paper addresses the dynamics of such co-evolution: are scientific networks deeply co-mingled with networks through which technology is created and if so how? It does so in a study of an emerging area of biomedicine—tissue engineering. The research is based on a novel methodology that takes advantage of the fact that an idea is often inscribed in both a patent and paper, thus forming a patent–paper pair. Starting with the pair, it is possible to trace the citation network of patents, papers, inventors and authors, combining traditional bibliometric analysis with in-depth interviews to provide new insights. The results show that for this case there exist distinctive scientific and technological networks. Furthermore, while there is evidence of overlap, it is neither co-publishing nor citation as might be predicted from current literature. Rather co-mingling exists through founding, licensing, consulting and advising. This has implications for our understanding of the processes through which spillovers arise, the way in which commercialization and technology transfer should be structured and for recent debates on conflict of interest in biomedicine.
We present quantitative and qualitative evidence on the relative productivity of university technology transfer offices (TTOs). Our empirical results suggest that TTO activity is characterized by constant returns to scale and that environmental and institutional factors explain some of the variation in performance. Productivity may also depend on organizational practices. Unfortunately, there are no quantitative measures available on such practices, so we rely on inductive, qualitative methods to identify them. Based on 55 interviews of 98 entrepreneurs, scientists, and administrators at five research universities, we conclude that the most critical organizational factors are faculty reward systems, TTO staffing/compensation practices, and cultural barriers between universities and firms.
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.
Increasing entrepreneurial activity within academia has raised concerns that the number of publications added to the scientific commons might be reduced or that academic research would be directed exclusively towards the application-oriented needs of industry. In the case of academic inventions, the potential conflict between public- and private-oriented considerations seems most salient. In this contribution, we examine whether the publication behavior of academic inventors (at K.U. Leuven) differs from their colleagues (non-inventors) working within similar fields of research. Our analysis reveals that inventors publish significantly more. Moreover, no empirical evidence was found for the ‘skewing problem’. These findings not only suggest the co-existence of both activities; they may actually reinforce each other.
The Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 facilitated the retention by universities of patent rights resulting from government funded academic research, thus encouraging university entry into patenting and licensing. Though the Act is widely recognized to be a major change in federal policy towards academic research, surprisingly little empirical analysis has been directed at assessing its impacts on the academy and on university–industry research relationships. An important exception is the work of Henderson et al. [Rev. Econ. Stat. 80 (1998) 119–127] which examined the impact of Bayh–Dole on the quality of university patents, as measured by the number of times they are cited in subsequent patents. The authors found that the quality of academic patents declined dramatically after Bayh–Dole, a finding that has potentially important policy implications. In this paper, we revisit this influential finding. By using a longer stream of patent citations data, we show that the results of the Henderson et al. study reflect changes in the intertemporal distribution of citations to university patents, rather than a significant change in the total number of citations these patents eventually receive. This has important implications not only for the evaluation of Bayh–Dole, but also for future research using patent citations as economic indicators.
The transfer of scientific and technological know-how into valuable economic activity has become a high priority on many policy agendas. Industry Science Links (ISLs) are an important dimension of this policy orientation. Over the last decades, multiple insights have been gained (both theoretical and empirical) as to how “effective” ISLs can be fostered through the design and the development of university-based technology transfer organizations (TTOs). In this paper, we document and analyze the evolution of “effective” university-based technology transfer mechanisms. We describe how decentralized organizational approaches and incentives that stimulate the active involvement of the research groups in the exploitation of their research findings might be combined with specialized central services offering intellectual property management and spin-off support. More particularly, we analyze how the creation of:(1)an appropriate balance between centralization and decentralization within academia;(2)the design of appropriate incentive structures for academic research groups;(3)the implementation of appropriate decision and monitoring processes within the TTOhas brought about critical elements in fostering an “effective” commercialization of the academic science base.
This paper surveys the existing fragmentary data on the growth of university-owned patents and university-invented patents in Europe. We find evidence that university patenting is growing, but this phenomenon remains heterogeneous across countries and disciplines. We found some evidence that university licensing is not profitable for most universities, although some do succeed in attracting substantial additional revenues. This might be due to the fact that patents and publications tend to go hand in hand. In a dynamic setting however, we fear that the increase in university patenting exacerbates differences across universities in terms of financial resources and research outcome.
This paper presents work directed at capturing the entrepreneurial and collaborative activity of university researchers. The Triple Helix points to the emergence of the entrepreneurial university as well as to an increasing overlay of activities in universities, industry and government. This study explores ways in which patent-based metrics could be utilized in a Triple Helix context, and how hybrid indicators could be developed by combining patent with survey data. More specifically, it aims to develop indicators that connect technological inventiveness of university researchers to both funding organizations and users, as well as to entrepreneurial activities by academics. The paper develops a simplified model of the innovation process to benchmark the relevance of the indicators to the Triple Helix. An analysis of Finnish academic patents illustrates that patent data can already provide useful indicators but, on its own, cannot provide information about how academic patents are interconnected with government or industry through funding or utilization links. An exclusive analysis of patents can point to patent concentrations on certain universities, to inventors and assignees, or to potential gaps in translating applied science into industrial technology. However, the patent data had to be combined with an inventor survey in order to relate academic patents more to their Triple Helix environment. The survey indicated that most patented academic inventions are connected to (often publicly funded) scientific research by the inventors and tend to be utilized in large firms rather than in start-up companies founded by academic entrepreneurs.
Policy-makers in many countries emphasize the importance of non-publication output of university research. Increasingly, policies are pursued that attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in universities and public research institutes. Apart from generating spin-out companies, technology licensing, and collaborative research, attention is focused on patenting activities of researchers. Some analysts suggest that there is a trade-off between scholarly publication and patenting activity. This paper explores this relationship drawing on a data set of nanoscience publications and nanotechnology patents in three European countries. In particular, this study examines whether researchers who both publish and patent are more productive and more highly cited than their peers who concentrate on scholarly publication in communicating their research results. Furthermore, this study investigates the collaborative activity of inventor-authors and their position in their respective networks of scientific communication. The findings suggest that overall there seems to be no adverse relationship between publication and patenting activity, at least not in this area of science and technology. Patenting scientists appear to outperform their solely publishing, non-inventing peers in terms of publication counts and citation frequency. However, while they are considerably over-represented in the top performance class, the data indicates that inventor-authors may not occupy top positions within that group. An analysis of co-authorship links indicates that patenting authors can also play a prominent role within networks of scientific communication. The network maps also point to groups where inventor-authors occur frequently and others where this is not the case, which possibly reflects cognitive differences between sub-fields. Finally, the data indicates that inventor-authors account only for a marginal share of publishing scholars while they play a substantial role amongst inventors.
As a consequence of the dramatic upheaval in East-Europe the German reunification has become one of the central problems of nowadays. Several relevant publications have more or less cautiously forecasted the rise of a new superpower in the midst of Europe. The present study attempts to shed light on some quantitative aspects of the research performance in both parts of Germany. Selected citation based indicators are used to determine the initial position and future of the United Germany in scientific research. Though the reunification involves an essential increase of the "scientific potential", the actual indicator values exhort to rather cautious expectations concerning the immediate intensification of research performance.
A citation study was carried out to predict the outcome of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. The correlation between scores achieved by academic departments in the UK in the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise, and the number of citations received by academics in those departments for articles published in the period 1994-2000, using the Institute for Scientific Informations citation databases, was assessed. A citation study was carried out on all three hundred and thirty eight academics that teach in the UK library and information science schools. These authors between them received two thousand three hundred and one citations for articles they had published between 1994 and the present. The results were ranked by Department, and compared to the ratings awarded to the departments in the 1996 Higher Education Funding Council Research Assessment Exercise. On the assumption that RAE scores and citation counts are correlated, predictions were made for the likely RAE scores in the 2001 RAE. Comments were also made on the impact of staff movements from one Higher Education Institution to another.
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.
Interest in intellectual property and other institutions that promote innovation exploded during the 1990s. Innovation and Incentives provides a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the economics of innovation, suitable for teaching at both the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels. It will also be useful to legal and economics professionals. Written by an expert on intellectual property and industrial organization, the book achieves a balanced mix of institutional details, examples, and theory. Analytical, empirical, or institutional factors can be given different emphases at different levels of study. Innovation and Incentives presents the historical, legal, and institutional contexts in which innovation takes place. After a historical overview of the institutions that support innovation, ranging from ancient history through today's government funding and hybrid institutions, the book discusses knowledge as a public good, the economic design of intellectual property, different models of cumulative innovation, the relation of competition to licensing and joint ventures, patent and copyright enforcement and litigation, private/public funding relationships, patent values and the return on R&D investment, intellectual property issues arising from direct and indirect network externalities, and globalization. The text presents technical and abstract analysis and at the same time sheds light on current controversies and policy-relevant topics, including the difficulty of enforcing copyright in the digital age and international protection of intellectual property.
In Germany, the "Inventor's Law" has, in the past, granted German university professors an exemption from the standard legal
obligation, known throughout industry, of notifying the employer of an invention. The inventor-professor was at the same time
the sole beneficiary of any and all financial income achieved by the commercialization of the invention. It was frequently
argued that, in essence, this old legislation was denying the German universities and, thereby, the German economy an economically
valuable intangible asset. Thus, legislation has very recently abolished the so-called "professor's privilege," with great
financial and political consequences.
Historically, commercial use of university research has been viewed in terms of spillovers. Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in technology transfer through licensing as universities attempt to appropriate the returns from faculty research. This change has prompted concerns regarding the source of this growth - specifically, whether it suggests a change in the nature of university research. We develop an intermediate input model to examine the extent to which the growth in licensing is due to the productivity observable inputs or driven by a change in the propensity of faculty and administrators to engage in commercializing university research. We model licensing as a three stage process, each involving multiple inputs. Nonparametric programming techniques are applied to survey data from 65 universities to calculate total factor productivity (TFP) growth in each state. To examine the sources of TFP growth, the productivity analysis is augmented by survey evidence from business who license-in university inventions. Results suggest that increased licensing is due primarily to an increased willingness of faculty and administrators to license and increased business reliance on external R&D rather than a shift in faculty research.
The rate of university patenting increased dramatically during the 1980s. To what extent did the knowledge flow patterns associated with public sector inventions change as university administrators and faculty seemingly became more commercially oriented? Using a Herfindahl-type measure of patent assignee concentration and employing a difference-in-differences estimation to compare university to firm patents across two time periods, we find that the university diffusion premium (the degree to which knowledge flows from patented university inventions are more widely distributed across assignees than those of firms) declined by over half during the 1980s. In addition, we find that the university diversity premium (the degree to which knowledge inflows used to develop patented university inventions are drawn from a less concentrated set of prior art holders than those used by firms) also declined by over half. Moreover, in both cases the estimated increase in knowledge flow concentration is largely driven by universities experienced in patenting, suggesting these phenomena are not likely to dissipate with experience.
In this paper, we analyze the research productivity of faculty entrepreneurs at 15 research institutes using a novel database combining faculty characteristics, licensing information, and journal publication records. We address two related research questions. First, are faculty entrepreneurs more productive researchers (“star scientists”) compared to their colleagues? Second, does the productivity of faculty entrepreneurs change after they found a firm? We find that faculty entrepreneurs in general are more productive researchers than control groups. We use multiple performance criteria in our analysis: differences in mean publication rate, skewness of publication rate, and impact of publications (journal citation rate). These findings bring together previous work on star scientists by Zucker, Darby, and Brewer [Zucker, L. G., Darby M. R., & Brewer M. B. (1998). The American Economic Review, 88, 290–306.] and tacit knowledge among university entrepreneurs by Shane [Shane, S. (2002). Management Science, 48, 122–137.] and Lowe [Lowe, R. A. (2001). In G. Libecap (Ed.) Entrepreneurial Inputs and Outcomes. Amsterdam: JAI Press, Lowe, R.A. (2006). Journal of Technology Transfer, 31(4), 412–429]. Finally, we find that faculty entrepreneurs’ productivity not only is greater than their peers but also does not decrease following the formation of a firm. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007
Using detailed data on biotechnology in Japan, we find that identifiable collaborations between particular university star scientists and firms have a large positive impact on firms' research productivity, increasing the average firm's biotech patents by 34 percent, products in development by 27 percent, and products on the market by 8 percent as of 1989-1990. However, there is little evidence of geographically localized knowledge spillovers. In early industry formation, star scientists holding tacit knowledge required to practice recombinant DNA (genetic engineering) were of great economic value, leading to incentives motivating their participation in technology transfer. In Japan, the legal and institutional context implies that firm scientists work in the stars' university laboratories in contrast to America where the stars are more likely to work in the firm's labs. As a result, star collaborations in Japan are less localized around their research universities so that the universities' local economic development impact is lessened. Stars' scientific productivity is increased less during collaborations with firms in Japan as compared to the U.S. Copyright 2001 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Based on longitudinal data for a matched sample of 592 Italian academic inventors and controls, the paper explores the impact of patenting on university professors’ scientific productivity, as measured by publication and citation counts. Academic inventors (university professors who appear as designated inventors on at least one patent application) publish more and better quality papers than their colleagues with no patents, and increase their productivity after patenting. Endogeneity problems are addressed using instrumental variables and applying inverse probability of treatment weights. The beneficial effect of patenting on publication rates last longer for academic inventors with more than one patent.