Academic Patents Research Articles

Gender differences, academic patenting, and tenure-track reform in China: Evidence from life sciences at elite universities.

This study is the first to examine the gender gap in academic patenting among faculty members in Chinese universities, a critical issue for the sustainable development of scientific research and innovation. Using a unique dataset that includes the patenting activities and professional status of 1,836 faculty members in life science-related departments at 36 top Chinese universities, this research reveals an evolving landscape of patenting dynamics. The trend of male faculty members leading in the annual number of patent applications and patents granted has shifted among newly graduated faculty members. Female faculty submit and receive their first patent applications significantly earlier than male faculty. However, male faculty are more likely to be lead inventors, and this gender gap remains difficult to close, with female faculty more likely to be supporting inventors. This research is contextualized within the broader framework of China's university tenure reform and the growing presence of women in the life sciences. While progress is evident, the study uncovers persistent systemic barriers that prevent women from fully translating their research into patentable innovations. By identifying these social and institutional barriers, our study not only sheds light on the gender gap, but also suggests policy measures to promote gender equity in scientific innovation, making it a critical read for policymakers and academic leaders.

Balancing act: Navigating the tensions between patenting practices and open science in Chilean academic research

This study aims to understand the relationship between academic patenting and secrecy in three key areas: the delay in publishing patentable results, the refusal of requests for research outcomes, and the perception of patent clarity drafting. Based on a dataset of Chilean university researchers, we conduct logistic regression models to understand the propensity to delay the publishing of patentable results, the probability of denying requests for research outcomes, and the likelihood of researchers perceiving their patents as clearly drafted. Controls used relate to the seniority of the researcher, the scientific field, whether the university is private or public, and whether the researcher previously worked with industry. Additionally, some constructs reflecting the researcher's perception regarding the patenting system within academic research were obtained through exploratory factor analysis and then incorporated as controls. The analysis reveals a positive correlation between prior patenting experience and publication delay. However, we found no correlation between previous patenting and the propensity to reject requests for research results. Both behaviors were negatively correlated to researcher seniority, gauged by the h-index, and positively correlated to forestry and agricultural technology sciences activity. Researchers who experienced denial of their requests were more likely to reciprocate refusal. Notably, a negative perception of the patent system within academic research was associated with a belief in drafting clearer patents. These findings suggest an environment of selective openness in academic networks, with researchers balancing full disclosure and secrecy. The paper studies three dimensions of secrecy in academic patenting through the novel data set. This study deepens our understanding of academic patenting practices, uncovering some complex dynamics shaping knowledge diffusion within universities.

The Potential of Technological Innovation in Transforming the Economy: A Framework and its Application to Assess Academic Patents

Technological innovation has played a fundamental role in the economic prosperity of firms and countries. Despite several studies on their effects on firms and markets, it is still necessary to assess how introducing technological innovation as innovative products, processes, and services will face extant market forces and transform them. This paper introduces a model for evaluating the potential economic effects of technological innovations based on three dimensions: technological paradigm, market value, and impact on extant industries. Based on the combination of these three dimensions, eight configurations of technological innovations are presented from an intertemporal perspective, considering their impact on the economy. This model has been validated by assessing several academic patents and helps evaluate the market potential of new technologies.

A Trust-Enhanced Patent Recommendation Approach to University-Industry Technology Transfer

Technology transfer enables the technology from legal owners to be used by others, and it is essential for technology innovation in modern society. However, transferring technology from academia to industry has become a challenging task due to the "cultural divide" problem, where researchers in universities tend to focus on knowledge discovery, while companies focus on making profits with application of proven technologies. This creates a mistrust problem for companies to use academic patents invented by universities. Various recommendation methods have been proposed for technology transfer purposes, but few have addressed the trust issue caused by the cultural divide. This paper proposes a multidimensional trust-enhanced recommendation approach to promote academic patent trading. The approach extracts patent information, users' online interactions, and technology transfer information for recommendation calculation. It includes 1) measuring the degree of connectivity between companies and patents by the Personalized PageRank model; 2) measuring the trustworthiness of a potential patent transaction from the aspects of patent quality, inventor, and university; and 3) adopting a logistic regression model to integrate the above measurements. The results of our user-based experiment show that the proposed recommendation approach obtains higher average hit rate and higher willingness scores than current recommendation methods.

The Impact of Institutional and Individual Determinants on Academic Patenting

The Impact of Institutional and Individual Determinants on Academic Patenting

The Role of Supporting Factors on Patenting Activities in Emerging Entrepreneurial Universities

Academic patenting has become an important part of the university-industry collaboration and technology transfer but few studies have investigated the institutional frameworks and organizational incentive and support structures in terms of patenting activity. This article, therefore, seeks to fill this gap by examining institutional and infrastructure supporting factors and the impact that they have on university patenting within an emerging economy higher education system, namely Turkey. The analyses use logit regression to test a set of hypotheses on a large-scale sample of Turkish universities. The findings highlight the positive role of supporting factors on a university's patenting performance, acting complementarily to the role of Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs). This article will be a guide for managers and practitioners to use supporting factors complementing the activities of TTOs in emerging economies in increasing patent applications. Finally, this article highlights future research directions and limitations of the research.

Expired patents: An opportunity for higher education institutions.

Patent protection typically lasts about 20 years from the filing date and is in exchange for sufficiently disclosing the invention. The disclosure aims to enrich technical knowledge globally, promote creativity and technological innovation and contribute to sustainable socio-economic development. After this protection period, the patent expires, and in principle, any person may begin practicing the specific subject matter previously protected by the patent. Since the invention originally met all the patentability requirements, it was disclosed sufficiently to stimulate further innovation by others through a thorough understanding of existing developments in the patent literature. Thus, in addition to scholarly research articles, this makes patents potentially valuable sources of technical information in research and academia, unlocking new technology opportunities. We use the exploratory research method to study a potentially genuine and vital research stream that uncovers the overlooked yet valuable scientific and technical information sources that higher education institutions could utilize to complement academic research articles. This work establishes a necessary research agenda that critically challenges researchers to tap into the immediately available and promising technology opportunities presented by patents in the public domain. Using case studies to gain in-depth, multi-faceted explorations about the impact of these patents, we find that technologies contained in expired patents, abandoned patents, and technologies not protected by IPRs, resulting in improved research quality and increased collaboration with industry, if adequately exploited and integrated with other technologies. Moreover, this could lead to increased academic patenting and commercialization with support from the university's Technology Transfer Office.

Commercialization of academic patents in Chinese universities: Antecedents and spatial spillovers

The commercialization of academic patents is a basic means for universities to promote economic growth and upgrade the industrial innovation of enterprises. However, among developing countries, the commercialization rate of university patents is generally low. This study utilizes data from 65 universities which are directly under the Ministry of Education of China to analyze the influencing factors and mechanisms of academic patent commercialization. The findings show that the proportion of associate professors, the size of service staff transforming research and development achievement, and the proportion of basic research funding in universities are positively correlated with the commercialization rate of university patents. In addition, these factors indirectly affect the commercialization of university patents by affecting neighboring universities; that is, there are spatial spillover effects in the commercialization of university patents between neighboring universities. These empirical results indicate that universities can promote the commercialization of university patents by optimizing the structure of faculty, developing the R&D achievement transformation service staff team, and strengthening investment in basic research.

Analysis of patent mortality rate across different technology fields in India

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to evaluate how indicators of patent quality affect the value of a patent, which can be measured by how often it is renewed (or “survives”). Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are becoming more important in a wide range of industries. In the same way, a country's intellectual strength can be judged by how many patents it has and how much research and development it does. The Cox-PH model and the accelerated failure time (AFT) model are used in this study to determine the patent's worth across the five major technology groups and ownership status. The final sample for survival analysis is made up of 40132 patents that were obtained from the Indian Patent Office between 1995 and 2005. (IPO). We find that broad academic patents don't last longer, but that the patent's ability to be used internationally makes it last longer. In contrast, institutional patents are geographically restricted. The collaboration appears to have a greater impact on patent value.

Development of Academic Patenting in European Regions – A Large Scale Analysis

Abstract In this article, we analyze academic patenting on an unprecedented scale - for 29 European countries. The comprehensive identification phase captures both groups of academic patents, in and outside of the ownership of universities. With stronger patent rights of universities, the share of university-owned patents is increasing faster. Nevertheless, even today, universities own only one third of their patents while the other two thirds remain in the property of individuals and companies. Universities have recently accounted for 13% of regional patent production and compared to firms their contribution to region’s innovation performance remains small. The share of academic patents is higher in Eastern Europe and in regions where innovative companies are lacking, in capital regions, and in regions with a strong tradition in academic patenting. The contribution of universities to the innovation performance of the most innovative regions is relatively small, although there are large differences, and the size of the contribution can vary significantly for similar levels of patent intensity. Given the effects of university research, it has been known since the 1990s that increasing university spending on research is driving innovation on the part of companies and within the region. However, such an effect is limited to high quality research and is most effective in terms of regional policy in poor regions where innovative companies are lacking. In this paper, instead of research expenditure, university patents filed with the EPO represent university research, as other patents are assumed to be a product of companies. We have found that the latter can be predicted by the volume of academic patents.

Spatial Interactions and the Commercialisation of Academic Patents: The Chinese Experience

Studies on academic patent commercialisation are well documented. However, spatial effects are seldom considered, which could lead to potentially misleading analytical results. This study addresses this concern by applying the spatial analysis method to investigate how university-level factors and commercialising academic patents are related. Using a comprehensive dataset of university patents from 1815 Chinese universities in 2016, we find that public research funding of universities, industrial research funding, the number of scientific research personnel, the number of monographs published, and the number of awarded achievements are positively related to the commercialisation of academic patents. However, the number of teaching and research personnel and the number of academic papers published are negatively related. There are positive spatial spillover effects in commercialising academic patents among neighbouring universities, but there will be negative spatial spillover effects in funding competition.

Does Rising R&D Investments Increase the Academic Patent Registration?

The aim of the research paper is to study and analyze academic patent registration in four countries of the European Union. In the research paper we identify the importance of academic patents and the action of knowledge-transfer. Moreover, we work with the phrase of academic patent registration rate. The reason of calculating with academic patent registration rate, is to receive the best quality calculations and comparations possible. Due to the fact, that the analyzed countries´ population number is different, we cannot compare academic patent registration number among them. One of the main goals of our research paper is to study, if there can be found a significant connection between the academic patent registration rate and the amount of the national research and development (R&D) investment in the selected countries. R&D expenditure is the percentual rate of money which countries have invested into research and development from their annual gross domestic product (GDP). We study and work with four selected countries of the EU, concretely Sweden, Denmark, Austria and Hungary. It means, we compare two different regions of the EU, northern countries with central EU countries. However, it is extremely important not to forget about the historical and cultural background of the mentioned studied areas, because those factors can highly influence the current behavior even in the mentioned research area. Theoretically, the nationally annually invested amount of money into R&D has a supportive role on the knowledge-transfer process of the country, and also should increase the number of academic registered patents. However, is the mentioned statement true and correct for the analyzed four countries? With our compressional research we realized that rising R&D investments do not have a positive effect on the academic patent registration rate. In three countries out of four, it was correct. However, in Sweden while the R&D expenditure was stagnating, the academic patent registration rate has shown a positive rise. We need to emphasize, that our analyzes do need further continuation of the research. Since we cannot make strong general statements, based on only four countries.

Global Trends and Opportunities in Hybrid Microgrid Systems Using Renewable Energies

Access to energy is related to the essential aspects of modern survival, impacting production processes, access to knowledge and economic development. The global energy demand grows every year, and remote areas without connection to central grids need viable and sustainable alternatives for generating, distributing and storing energy at the local level. This paper presents an analysis through academic research, patent publications, reports and government information to map global trends and identify the opportunities for hybrid systems for power generation in microgrids from renewable sources and with several modes of generation. The data showed recent exponentially rising technologies with a tendency to continue for the next few years. China leads in isolation followed by USA and India. Countries like Brazil and Mexico, despite favourable conditions, do not present local technological development nor are they seen as a market of interest. Technological and research routes point to improving storage processes. Photovoltaic energy source was most used and to lesser extent wind, biomass, bioethanol, biogas, biodiesel and biohydrogen. Most of the inventions were focused on creating and improving machines, equipment, and systems to operate and control, utilizing the Homer software, for example.

Examining Key Technologies Among Academic Patents Through an Analysis of Standard-Essential Patents

With the growing focus and development on the industrialization of the research and development (R&D) outcomes of universities, academic patents have witnessed significant growth in recent years. However, previous development directions for the technologies of academic patents have mostly focused on patents approved by or applied for with major patent offices; few have examined from the perspective of standard-essential patents (SEPs). This study examined key technologies of academic SEPs through network analysis. The findings revealed that most of the key technologies of academic SEPs are involved in wireless communication networks and the transmission of digital information, electric digital data processing, control or regulating systems, and secret communication systems. Among these, secret communication systems are key technologies in academia, and more scientific research resources should be invested in secret communication R&D in the future. In addition, the key technologies of academic SEPs have changed; specifically, image coding technology has undergone major developments. Accordingly, this study developed a key technology network model for academic standard-essential patents to verify those academic technologies that are vital to industrial applications.

What, Where, When and How of COVID-19 Patents Landscape: A Bibliometrics Review.

Two years after COVID-19 came into being, many technologies have been developed to bring highly promising bedside methods to help fight this epidemic disease. However, owing to viral mutation, how far the promise can be realized remains unclear. Patents might act as an additional source of information for informing research and policy and anticipating important future technology developments. A comprehensive study of 3741 COVID-19-related patents (3,543 patent families) worldwide was conducted using the Derwent Innovation database. Descriptive statistics and social network analysis were used in the patent landscape. The number of COVID-19 applications, especially those related to treatment and prevention, continued to rise, accompanied by increases in governmental and academic patent assignees. Although China dominated COVID-19 technologies, this position is worth discussing, especially in terms of the outstanding role of India and the US in the assignee collaboration network as well as the outstanding invention portfolio in Italy. Intellectual property barriers and racist treatment were reduced, as reflected by individual partnerships, transparent commercial licensing and diversified portfolios. Critical technological issues are personalized immunity, traditional Chinese medicine, epidemic prediction, artificial intelligence tools, and nucleic acid detection. Notable challenges include balancing commercial competition and humanitarian interests. The results provide a significant reference for decision-making by researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and investors with an interest in COVID-19 control.

How commercializing academic patents promote economic growth: mediating effect and spatial spill over

ABSTRACT Governmental investment in commercializing academic patents has spurred economic growth. This study explores the mechanism underlying the impact of academic patent commercialization on regional economic development based on holistic view of the integration of local and neighbourhood hierarchies. The empirical analysis of a sample of 31 Chinese provinces from 2010 to 2019 shows that fiscal expenditures on science and technology mediate the relationship between academic patent commercialization and economic development. Moreover, there is a positive spatial spill over effect between developing economies of neighbouring provinces. In the knowledge economy era, academic patent commercialization, supported by fiscal expenditure, plays an increasingly important role in regional economic growth.

Práticas gerenciais de valoração de patentes acadêmicas

Objective: To understand the patent valuation practices developed in the academic context to promote innovation.Methodology: A systematic review of the literature was carried out from the scientific bases Scopus and Web of Science using specific search strings, in which 377 works were found. After applying the defined criteria, eight articles were analyzed.Originality: The study is justified due to the importance of understanding the valuation of academic patents as an inducer of innovation.Main results: The results led to a current understanding of perspectives related to the valuation of academic patents on two fronts: models of academic patent valuation and managerial practices of patent valuation in order to promote innovation.Theoretical-methodological contributions: The research presents an incremental theoretical contribution in the area of valuation of academic patents.Social/Managerial Contributions: Academic patent valuation practices are important mechanisms to induce technological innovation by universities, and the gains are generally defined in the form of royalties.

Aluminum alloy compositions and properties extracted from a corpus of scientific manuscripts and US patents

Researchers continue to explore and develop aluminum alloys with new compositions and improved performance characteristics. An understanding of the current design space can help accelerate the discovery of new alloys. We present two datasets: 1) chemical composition, and 2) mechanical properties for predominantly wrought aluminum alloys. The first dataset contains 14,884 entries on aluminum alloy compositions extracted from academic literature and US patents using text processing techniques, including 550 wrought aluminum alloys which are already registered with the Aluminum Association. The second dataset contains 1,278 entries on mechanical properties for aluminum alloys, where each entry is associated with a particular wrought series designation, extracted from tables in academic literature.

An Overview on patenting trends and technology commercialization practices in the university Technology Transfer Offices in USA and China

The Technology Transfer Office is critical in translating university research into commercial value. This research paper analyzes the performances of university Technology Transfer Office models as well as their technology transfer mechanisms. The first step of this research project involves conducting patent information searches on databases to investigate academic patenting activities in the USA and China. Many Technology Transfer Offices, have similar intellectual property licensing practices and the involvement of industrial partners throughout the commercialization process. However, during the comparison it is found that the Technology Transfer Office working models varied in several ways. The main difference is that the pace at which patenting is accomplished in the USA and Chinese universities is far more sophisticate. Because of substantial resources and government support, Proof of Concept funding at various stages of technological maturity is steadily developing at universities in the USA and China. Furthermore, both USA and Chinese universities are very active in teaching and incentivizing their faculty and students about the importance of academic entrepreneurship and are well-versed with skilled technology transfer professionals who have all the necessary skills to transfer technology.

The Gender Gap in Academic Patenting

The Gender Gap in Academic Patenting