On the consequences of university patenting: What can we learn by asking directly to academic inventors? (original) (raw)

Institutional Change and Academic Patenting: French Universities and the Innovation Act of the 1999

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2010

Recent empirical work in the field of university-industry technology transfer has stressed the importance of IPR-related reforms and university patenting has major forces behind the success of US high-tech industry. European policy-makers have been tempted to explain the poorer technological performance of their countries with the lower propensity of their academic institutions to get engaged in patenting and commercializing their research results. As a consequence, a number of measures have been taken to promote academic awareness of IPRs, as part of more comprehensive policies in favour of academic commercialization and entrepreneurship. This paper explores university patenting, and the related policies, in France. We provide evidence that university patenting in that countries has been underestimated by policymakers' perceptions: French academic scientists are in fact responsible for no less than 3% of patents by French inventors at the European Patent Office. However, only 10% of academicinvented patents are owned by domestic universities, with the remainder assigned both to firms and to Public Research Organizations (PROs). We then explore the impact of the Innovation Act, passed in France in 1999. We find that the Act has significantly increased the likelihood an academic patent to be assigned to a university rather than to a business company. We also find, that the opening of a technology transfer office in a university appears to have a stronger and more significant impact than the Act on the decision of universities to retain IPRs over their scientists' discoveries.

Institutional Change and Academic Patenting: French Universities and the Innovation Act of 1999

Recent empirical work in the field of university-industry technology transfer has stressed the importance of IPR-related reforms and university patenting has major forces behind the success of US high-tech industry. European policy-makers have been tempted to explain the poorer technological performance of their countries with the lower propensity of their academic institutions to get engaged in patenting and commercializing their research results. As a consequence, a number of measures have been taken to promote academic awareness of IPRs, as part of more comprehensive policies in favour of academic commercialization and entrepreneurship. This paper explores university patenting, and the related policies, in France. We provide evidence that university patenting in that countries has been underestimated by policy-makers’ perceptions: French academic scientists are in fact responsible for no less than 3% of patents by French inventors at the European Patent Office. However, only 10% of academic-invented patents are owned by domestic universities, with the remainder assigned both to firms and to Public Research Organizations (PROs). We then explore the impact of the Innovation Act, passed in France in 1999. We find that the Act has significantly increased the likelihood an academic patent to be assigned to a university rather than to a business company. We also find, that the opening of a technology transfer office in a university appears to have a stronger and more significant impact than the Act on the decision of universities to retain IPRs over their scientists’ discoveries.

University Patenting and its Effects on Academic Research

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2004

The paper explores the possible consequences for academic research of increased patenting in European universities. It underlines that most of the policy literature refers to the advantages of university patenting without balancing them against the costs or the risks involved in the activities. We provide a brief description of university patenting activity in Europe examining both university-owned patents and university-invented patents. The review of the literature reveals that unlike the United States, little is known in Europe about the changes taking place in public research as a result of increased patenting and increased institutionalisation of patents. We discuss possible analytical approaches to identify both short-term and long-term effects.

Commercializing academic research: the quality of faculty patenting

Industrial and Corporate Change, 2011

The knowledge produced by academic scientists has been identified as a potential key driver of technological progress. Recent policies in Europe aim at increasing commercially orientated activities in academe. Based on a sample of German scientists across all fields of science, we investigate the importance of academic patenting. Our findings suggest that academic involvement in patenting results in a citation premium, as academic patents appear to generate more forward citations. We also find that in the European context of changing research objectives and funding sources since the mid-1990s, the "importance" of academic patents declines over time. We show that academic entrants have patents of lower "quality" than academic incumbents but they did not cause the decline, since the relative importance of patents involving academics with an existing patenting history declined over time as well. Moreover, a preliminary evaluation of the effects of the abolishment of the "professor privilege" (the German counterpart of the US Bayh-Dole Act) reveals that this legal disposition led to an acceleration of this apparent decline.

University patenting and its effects on academic research: The emerging European evidence

Research Policy, 2006

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.

The Unequal Benefits of Academic Patenting for Science and Engineering Research

IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2009

The increase of university patents has raised issues of potential conflicts of interest in Faculty activities. Nonetheless, recent empirical evidence has indicated that very productive scientists contribute disproportionally to academic patenting and that inventing is likely to encourage an increase in scientific productivity. This article adds to this evidence by showing that such beneficial effects are not likely to be earned equally by every scientist. The analysis was run in a large sample of Italian scientists contributing to materials sciences in either chemistry or engineering of materials, and makes use of several econometric techniques that are suitable for treating unobserved heterogeneity, excess zeros, and incidental truncation. Results indicate that benefits are higher when the feedback from applied research is richer, and when regimes of secrecy are less harsh, which is more likely to be the case with engineering, as opposed to hard science research. If confirmed by further evidence, the findings suggest that academic policies in matters of intellectual property rights should be refined and tailored to field specificities.

Patent Production at a European Research University: Exploratory Evidence at the Laboratory Level

Journal of Technology Transfer, 2006

Most studies of academic patenting focus on the university as the unit of analysis. In contrast, we examine this phenomenon at the laboratory level. Based on a sample of 83 research laboratories of Louis Pasteur University (ULP, Strasbourg, France) from 1993 to 2000, we constructed a panel data set that allows us to discriminate between patents that are owned by the university and those that are owned by firms and other organizations but invented by faculty members. We use these data to estimate a patent production function and find that university-owned patents are more responsive to specific public funding, while non-university-owned patents are more responsive to industrial funding. Our results also highlight the importance to control for disciplinary and institutional differences, since they significantly affect the production of the different kinds of ULP patents.