Abstract
This paper assesses the extent to which patent renewal data is associated with government funding in a university context by focusing on the relationship between the funded patentees and renewal decisions of their patents. The aim of this paper is to show whether receiving funding from government contributes to high-value patents as measured by the patent renewal decisions made by their owners. Our observations of academic nanotechnology patents in Canada discovered a positive relationship between funded researchers and the rate of patent renewal after 4 years. Further analysis is also undertaken into the relative impact on patent renewal after 8 years and 12 years. Our results suggest that the length of patent renewal in numbers of years can be related to levels of government funding received by their inventors.
Highlights
The increasingly expensive patent maintenance fees needed to protect intellectual property bring the necessity to better approximate patent value and to identify relevant indicators for this patent value
In this study we demonstrate the relevance of patent quality indicators–the number of citations that patents received, and the number of claims contained in the patents–on patent renewal decisions
Turning briefly to our control variables, we find that the chances of renewing a patent are higher when academic inventors have more patents, i.e. there is a positive correlation between the total number of patents and patent renewals in all three tables (Tables 1, 2 and 3)
Summary
The increasingly expensive patent maintenance fees needed to protect intellectual property bring the necessity to better approximate patent value and to identify relevant indicators for this patent value. A study of patent renewal decisions universities to retain the rights to patents which emanate from federally funded research programs and encouraged them to collaborate with industry to promote the utilization of their patents arising from such public funding. The passage of this legislation changed the way academic inventors develop technologies from government-funded research in the US and since many countries have adopted similar policies [8,9,10]. It provides evidence to the effect that receiving government funding infers a higher economic value of academic innovations and as such constitutes a novel research avenue that differs from prior studies of patent renewal data.
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