Comparing Academic and Corporate Technology Development Processes*

Abstract

There is a growing concern that a large portion of innovation, one area in which the United States has excelled, may soon follow manufacturing to less costly, more efficient countries overseas. Although U.S. innovators collectively still have more patentable technologies granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) than all other countries, offshore competitors have made substantial gains with recent year‐to‐year percent increases much larger than the United States. Of concern is the relatively low number of patents granted to academic innovators. In spite of the Bayh‐Dole Act of 1980, success in this area has been limited with the proportion of patents from academia being less than 2 percent of the total patents awarded in the United States in the years since the act. Consequently, this article examines the U.S. technology development process in a descriptive study to determine exactly how and where academic and corporate inventors differ in their approaches. A series of structured interviews with academic and corporate innovators was conducted as part of a larger study investigating the technology development processes of academic and corporate inventors. Each inventor developed a concept map describing the particular process followed. To do this, a comprehensive set of possible development process elements was compiled. Inventors were then asked to select and then to arrange the elements they actually used to reflect their individual process. The resultant maps were examined using five different approaches—three quantitative and two qualitative. These analyses clearly documented that, on average, academic inventors used significantly less elements in their process (maps) than did their corporate counterparts, and further, that there was little commonality among elements on the academic maps. Overall, the corporate maps were viewed as being more complete, correct, and organized than the academic maps. This article reveals that for a small number of academic inventors and for a single technology scope, activities such as defining the market and IT growth potential, actual versus planned cost evaluation, and determination of changing customer needs/market requirements are not being conducted by the inventor. If such activities were performed either by the academic inventor or more logically by the PTO, more licensures and patents may occur.