Commercializing academic research: the quality of faculty patenting

By Dirk Czarnitzki, K. Hussinger, Cédric Schneider. 2011

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 greater knowledge externalities, 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-90?s, 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 U.S. Bayh-Dole Act) reveals that this legal disposition led to an acceleration of this apparent decline.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/226302fd87d9f43e9ca3dcdc16d8cc2603e89ac4

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Management of Technology and Innovation

Citations in the corpus

Chinese university patents: quantity, quality, and the role of subsidy programs (2014, unknown): “139, 80804 Munich, Germany”
University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege (2016, unknown): “The premise behind the policy change was to encourage universities to make investments that support patenting and licensing by their researchers and labs, so that this property rights transfer would improve commercialization outcomes on net (Czarnitzki et al. 2011).”
Formal and Informal Knowledge and Technology Transfer from Academia to Industry: Complementarity Effects and Innovation Performance (2013, background): “The professors’ right to commercialize inventions privately before 2002 is reflected by a low number of German university patents (Czarnitzki et al., 2007; 2009b; 2011), which translates into low university licensing activities in Germany as compared to the US, where the Bayh-Dole Act, which can be…”
Breaking the Ivory Tower: Academic Entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences in UK and Germany (2011, background): “We also ound a strong negative coefficient on whether the scientists re employed in a University compared to PRO’s, consistent with ther studies (Czarnitzki et al., 2008; Gulbrandsen and Smeby, 005; Edler et al., 2008).”
The nexus between science and industry: evidence from faculty inventions (2012, background): “…trend towards increased commercialization in the public science sector is 24 accompanied by a decrease in the average quality of academic inventions and that the abolishment of the German professors’ privilege coincides with an acceleration of this patent quality decline (Czarnitzki et al., 2008).”
Informal university technology transfer: a comparison between the United States and Germany (2010, background): “The scientists’ right to commercialize inventions privately before 2002 is still reflected by a rather low number of German university patents (Czarnitzki et al., 2007; Czarnitzki et al., 2008) and few licensing agreements (Grimpe and Hussinger, 2008) compared to the United States.”
Industry Funding of University Research and Scientific Productivity (2011, unknown): “Patent forward citations have been proved to be a suitable measure for the quality, importance or significance of a patented invention and have been used in various studies (see e.g. Henderson et al. 1998a; Hall et al. 2001; Trajtenberg 2001 or Czarnitzki et al. 2008).”
Changes to university IPR regulations in Europe and the impact on academic patenting (2011, background): “This change was motivated by a concern among policymakers that individual researchers might be unwilling or unable to pursue commercial application of their ideas through patenting or licensing activity (Czarnitzki et al., 2008).”