University IPRs and knowledge transfer: is university ownership more efficient?

Abstract

This paper addresses an issue that has been largely ignored so far in the empirical literature on the role of patents in university–industry knowledge transfer: does it matter who owns the patents on university research? We observe that especially in Europe, many patents in which university researchers are listed as inventors are not owned by the university. From a literature review, we conclude that private ownership of university patents may reduce the efficiency of the knowledge transfer process. This hypothesis is put to an empirical test, using data on patents in six European countries. Specifically, we assess whether university-owned patents (in Europe) are more often applied, and/or more economically valuable, than university-invented (but not-owned) patents. Our results indicate that, after correcting for observable patent characteristics, there are only very small differences between university-owned and university-invented patents in terms of their rate of commercialization or economic value.

Keywords:

• university patenting
• public–private technology transfer
• European universities

JEL Classification :

• O3
• I28

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Ed Steinmueller for comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at workshops, conferences and seminars at the European University Institute, Florence (IT); the Copenhagen Business School (DK); the European Science Open Forum, Munich (DE); Birkbeck College, London (UK); the University of Sussex, Brighton (UK); the European Patent Office, Den Haag (NL); and the Roundtable for Engineering Entrepreneurship Research, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (US). Comments and suggestions from participants at these meetings are much appreciated. The paper has also benefitted from the comments of two anonymous referees. The creation of the PatVal database used in this analysis was supported by the European Commission PatVal project. Aldo Geuna acknowledges support from the International Centre for Economic Research (ICER), Torino (IT). The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

The reason why our data refer to this period is that we aim to have dependable data on the economic value of the patent, which becomes obvious only after a significant amount of time has passed.

These results differ between countries. The shares of university patents in the samples per country are as follows (the results are presented as share in number of cases/share in weights): UK 9.01%/9.22%, DE 3.23%/3.62%, FR 4.04%/3.95, IT 4.00%/3.94%, NL 5.25%/5.18%, and ES 6.32%/6.07%. The deviation between the two percentages is most serious in Germany (DE), where we seem to have some overrepresentation of university inventions.

See Geuna and Nesta (2006) and references cited in their paper for preliminary evidence of this phenomenon in a few European countries.

The case of the UK can be explained by the fact that the only two major PROs were active in the period considered. These were DERA (now privatized as QuinetiQ) and the Medical Research Centre, both owned by the respective ministry and therefore the ownership of patents was assigned to the ministries.

In the period considered in our analysis, the British Technology Group (BTG) was created from the privatization of the National Research Development Corporation (merged with the National Enterprise Board), the public organization created in the late 1940s to commercialize innovations resulting from publicly funded research. Following the tradition, until the mid-1990s, BTG was chosen by a large number of universities to be the assignee of academic patents. Our sample includes 14 patents assigned to BTG, and they were classified in the companies class.

Although this is a subjective variable that could be severely contaminated by measurement errors, it has been extensively validated by the PatVal team and the results of this validation process seemed highly consistent (Gambardella, Harhoff, and Verspagen 2005, 2008; Giuri et al. 2007).

Note that the inventor that responded to the questionnaire is not always the/a university patent inventor.

We also tested whether university-owned and university-invented patents differ with respect to commercial use by the patent holder. Surprisingly, we found no significant difference between the two groups. Since universities are normally not in the habit of undertaking economic activity other than education and research, we expected this variable to be low for the university category. However, we found that roughly half of the university-owned patents had been used for commercial purposes by the applicant/owner. Our conclusion, based on inspection of the data, is that (university) respondents have assumed licensing to be a form of commercial application, and hence the results for this variable overlap with those for licensing.

Sixty-seven patents are cut from the sample as a result of this. The regressions that we ran for the samples including these 67 patents do show a weakly significant effect of ownership on Patent used. This seems to point out that universities are more efficient at commercializing their patents relative to individuals and/or PROs, but not relative to firms. These results are available on request.

The signs and significance levels of the university ownership variable are always the same for the full model and the parsimonious model, and hence our conclusions are not affected by including or excluding explanatory variables.

Gambardella, Harhoff, and Verspagen (2005) provide a more elaborate approach to explain patent value than we can do here, and provide more enlightening insights for the total PatVal sample.

If the balancing property is not satisfied, we include the last insignificant variable that we excluded, until the restriction is satisfied.