Abstract
The process of technology commercialization involves numerous hurdles, from the original idea to its translation into the market. Patenting brings to light the research activities created through university-industry collaborations. This paper explores patent propensity, as related to commercializing innovative activities resulting from collaborations between universities and regional small and medium enterprises (SMEs). To achieve our aims, we apply a robust regression analysis to test five research hypotheses using firm-level data on 263 firms located in the Gwangju region of Korea. Our empirical results show that certain industry characteristics are negatively related to the propensity to patent. In addition, and contrary to expectations, it is found that the InnoBiz firms that the government designated as innovative SMEs are not performing any differently from general firms. It is only the CEO’s academic credentials that are found to be positively related to propensity to patent. From the findings, we can conclude that patenting propensity is likely related to CEOs’ managerial strategies rather than the particular characteristics of the technology in question. We also suggest new technology commercialization related with universities’ policies and support to promote regional SMEs including conglomerated firms as well as universities.
Highlights
To stay ahead in an era of incredibly rapid change and stiff global completion, firms have had to pursue access to exclusive resources, such as new knowledge
The object of this study is to discover whether there is any empirical evidence that characteristics of the industry, characteristics of the firm, InnoBiz, age of the firm, research division or the academic credentials of the CEO might affect a firm’s patent propensity
Based on the findings from the review of literature on small and medium enterprises (SMEs)’ innovation activities and innovative outcomes and the availability of representative data, we may postulate a model of patent propensity as follows: Patentsi = β0 + β1ResFuni + β2Agei + β3ResDivi + β4Researcheri + β5InnoBizi + β6IndCodei + β7CEOdegi + εi where the subscript i indicates firm, ResFun, Age, ResDiv, Researcher, InnoBiz, IndCode and CEOdeg are research fund, age of firm, research division, InnoBiz certified, industry code and CEO degree, the β’s are the effects of the explanatory variables on the number of patents and ε is an error term that captures the effects of left-out variables, measurement error in patents and random events
Summary
To stay ahead in an era of incredibly rapid change and stiff global completion, firms have had to pursue access to exclusive resources, such as new knowledge. Reference [6] argued that the more experience accumulated by biotech with university partners, the greater the performance impact of these university-industry collaborations, while [8] demonstrate that firms located in proximity to universities are likely to grow faster than other firms thanks to university-industry collaboration These collaborations have the potential to act as a bridge in transforming academic discoveries into commercially successful innovations [6]. The focus of this paper on a specific stage—patenting—sets it apart from most prior studies, which have approached industry-university collaboration from the standpoint of the overall process of technology transfer and commercialization, by means of an exploratory and qualitative approach. The lack of any significant differences in innovation activities and outcomes between InnoBiz firms and general SMEs is highly unexpected Another factor of importance is the number of researchers, which has a positive effect on patent propensity.
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