Abstract
This paper examines the determinants of university exclusive versus non-exclusive licenses. We specifically focus on the effect of the characteristics of the licensed invention (i.e. stage of development, specificity and appropriability). We rely on a unique and original dataset of 91 inventions contained in 62 intellectual property licensing contracts executed in the period of 2005–2014 by two leading French research universities. We cannot find a significant relation between the characteristics of the invention and the degree of exclusivity. In particular, as opposed to theoretical predictions, embryonic inventions are not significantly linked to more exclusive licenses and generic inventions are not significantly linked to non-exclusive licenses. Furthermore, inventions that are both generic and embryonic are not significantly linked to exclusive licenses per field of use. These results, although still exploratory, contribute to feed the discussion about the performance of university-industry technology transfer since they suggest that performance might be improved by taking more into account the characteristics of the licensed invention.
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