University Patenting Research Articles

Co-evolution patterns of university patenting and technological specialization in European regions

This paper provides novel evidence on co-evolution patterns of the technological specialization of innovation activities of firms and academic institutions located in the same European region during the years from 2003 to 2014. We exploit a novel and unique dataset merging data on EU-funded R&D projects, universities, patents, and economic region-level data for a large sample of universities and firms co-located in geographical areas at the third level of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS3), which correspond to a sub-regional scale of analysis. Our results indicate the presence of substantial heterogeneity across the analyzed EU regions with respect to the co-evolution of industry and academia specializations. In particular, we find that the specialization into a new technological domain is led by the local academic research system only in a few cases. We also document that a number of factors, at both the university and region levels, are associated with convergent or divergent processes in the relative specialization of the innovation activities carried out by firms and universities co-located in the same region.

The Impact of University Patenting on the Technological Specialization of European Regions: A Technology-Level Analysis

The Impact of University Patenting on the Technological Specialization of European Regions: A Technology-Level Analysis

Government funding of university-industry collaboration: exploring the impact of targeted funding on university patent activity

With innovation as a third mission of universities, governments around the world have competitive funding schemes to support university-industry collaboration. Little is known about the effectiveness of these schemes compared to traditional competitive funding programs in increasing commercially valuable research outputs from universities. We explore whether university-industry targeted schemes are more effective by comparing two Australian funding programs that share the processes of how funds are awarded—one with a requirement of university-industry collaboration, the other traditional, not requiring collaboration. We use patenting activity as our measure of commercially valuable research outputs. We find that university inventors awarded university-industry targeted grants have greater patent activity compared to those awarded non-targeted grants. Analysing the dynamics, we find the effect is rather short lived, with an increase in patent activity in the year of award of grant not persisting in subsequent years. We find a similar effect on a university level. We also find that the number of new patent applications, but not patents granted, is greatest when universities achieve a mix of both types of funding.

Prospect patents and CRISPR; rivalry and ethical licensing in a semi-commons environment.

The prospect theory of patents views patents as a tool for the development and commercialization of inventions. Prospect patents rely on broad control of technology so that rivalry between competing products is diminished thus avoiding waste of common-pool resources. The theory has been widely criticized but in this article we argue that it does not address the realities of an economy where many innovations are created by universities. Although university patents on inventions such as new gene-editing tools fit squarely in the definition of prospect patents, they may still allow rivalry to resurface at the commercialization stage. This rivalry is not between competing firms; it is between competing visions of the prospect: ‘the university’s vision versus the licensees.’ We use as a case study the CRISPR-Cas9 technology invented by universities and commercialized by licensees. We employ patent landscape analysis showing that CRISPR-Cas9’s prospects comply with the characteristics of prospect patents and, above all, diminish rivalry at the commercialization stage. As the lack of competition leads to excessive treatment prices, tensions arise because the licensee understands CRISPR-Cas9 as a revenue-generating prospect, whereas the university views it as a technology requiring broad distribution. Such discerning visions can breed rivalry between licensor and licensee despite broad patent rights. In addressing this we turn to the literature on semi-commons, which implies an environment where private rights of exclusion such as prospect patents work with ethical licenses and a domain of resources open for reuse to foster innovation. We argue that in this environment, universities can emerge as important actors in the regulatory enterprise through additional ex post licensing. To this end, we propose a market-based solution in the form of a license allowing for patent re-licensing if the licensee fails to address a predefined demand for the final product.

Impact of university-industry collaborative research with different dimensions on university patent commercialisation

ABSTRACT The purpose of the paper is to investigate the impact of university-industry collaborative research with different dimensions on university patent commercialisation and offer suggestions to promote patent commercialisation. University-industry collaborative research is measured by the university-industry collaborative patent application. Collaboration breadth and depth are defined. The theories about the impacts of the collaboration breadth and depth on university patent commercialisation are analysed and the hypotheses are proposed accordingly. We explore the impacts by negative binomial regression with the panel data set constructed from the patent data of the ‘double first-class’ universities in China during 2015–2017. Results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the collaboration breadth and the university patent commercialisation. Nevertheless, the collaboration depth has no impact on university patent commercialisation. And surprisingly, the interaction of breadth and depth shows a negative impact on it. Suggestions are offered that universities should avoid collaborating with industry inordinately and pay attention to balance breadth and depth of the collaboration with industry, improving the quality of the collaboration and promoting patent commercialisation.

Universities as Engines of Development

Abstract The Bayh–Dole Act was enacted in the United States in 1980 to promote economic development and growth at regional and national levels. A key engine is research generated within universities. This article addresses the question of how universities can serve as engines of development. Drawing on Cooter and Shaeffer’s work on law and development, specifically what they call the double trust problem, this article shows how the Bayh–Dole Act was justified as resolving the double trust problem arising from lack of property rights in university research. This article presents the argument that this goal of the Bayh–Dole Act ignores how universities solve another dimension of the double trust problem, namely the generation of human capital. The author examines the theoretical justifications for the Bayh–Dole Act and universities and the empirical policy literature assessing university patenting and commercialization in the United States, South Africa, and India.

An assessment of the determinants of licensing of university patents: a survey of Spanish universities

PropósitoEste trabajo intenta arrojar luz sobre qué factores pueden influir, positiva o negativamente, en la decisión de licenciar una patente de una universidad, con el fin de ofrecer algunas recomendaciones que puedan contribuir a aumentar el número de patentes universitarias.Diseño de la investigaciónBasado en una muestra de investigadores en universidades españolas que ya han registrado patentes, este trabajo muestra que los factores individuales superan a los factores institucionales a la hora de determinar la decisión de patentar una invención. Asimismo, la probabilidad de patentar una invención es mayor cuando el nivel de participación del investigador en el proceso es mayor.RecomendacionesLos resultados de nuestro estudio nos permiten afirmar que, en el ámbito universitario español, los factores individuales juegan un papel más importante en la decisión de solicitar una patente que los factores institucionales. En este sentido, la colaboración de empresas o expertos de fuera de la academia en la investigación a partir de la cual se otorgó la patente es el factor más relevante.OriginalidadEste trabajo es el primer estudio de este tipo que se realiza en Europa y concluye con una recomendación para reforzar la estructura y la funcionalidad de las oficinas de transferencia de tecnología (OTRI) como política básica para la promoción de la explotación comercial de la innovación en las universidades.

Identifying Knowledge Spillovers from Universities: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Urban China

This paper studies the impact of universities on local innovation activity by exploiting a unique university expansion policy in China as a quasi-experiment. We take a geographic approach that is empowered by geocoded data on patents and new products at the address level to identify knowledge spillovers as an important channel. We obtain three main findings. First, university expansion significantly increases universities’ own innovation capacity, which results in a dramatic boom of local patents not related to universities. Second, the impact of university expansion on local innovation activities attenuates sharply within 2 kilometers of the universities. Third, university expansion boosts nearby firms’ new products and the number of nearby industrial patents that cite university patents but not those industrial patents that cite patents far away from universities.

Benchmarking U.S. university patent value and commercialization efforts: A new approach

Despite the economic significance of patented university research, it is difficult to measure the economic value of academic patented inventions and observe the extent to which universities are able to capture such value through patent licensing. Moving beyond assessing commercialization performance by simple statistics, we propose a new approach to benchmarking university patents and commercialization performance based on comparative corporate patent value. Our procedure involves matching university patents to patents with similar patent characteristics granted to public corporations, then estimating the “potential value” of these university patents by stock market reactions to grants of the matched corporate patents. These estimated values of university patents can significantly explain the technology-level income from licensing by a leading US research university and the annual licensing income of the member universities of the Association of University Technology Managers’ (AUTM). We find that AUTM universities realize an average of 16% of the estimated value of matched corporate patents. We also investigate correlates of university‐level potential patent value and suggest avenues for future research.

Technology Transfer Performance and Mindsets of TTO Staff:— Evidence from Japan and Europe —

A comparative analysis focusing on the mindsets of technology transfer office's (TTO) staff supporting the commercialization of university-based research is presented in this paper. The study compares Japanese TTO staff with European TTO staff through which the academia-industry related laws preparation period and scale of technology transfer market resemble those of Japan. The research analyzes three mindsets: mindsets toward cost effectiveness of intellectual property management; mindsets toward commercialization of university-based research; and mindsets toward contributions to local communities. These results may suggest Japanese TTO staff leaning toward the mindset of commercialization of university-based research and have a strong mindset of utilizing from university patents. However, Japanese TTO staff exhibit a weak mindset toward cost effectiveness of intellectual property management and local social contributions.

China’s Bayh-Dole Act and University Patenting: A Contingency Perspective

Around the world, universities are playing an increasingly important role in the technological development of industries. Many counties emulate policies like the Bayh-Dole Act in the US by giving universities full property rights of government-funded research. Bayh-Dole-like laws have been empirically examined with mixed findings, but few studies have considered the institutional conditions and investigated the causal effect of the Bayh-Dole like policy in developing and transition economies like China. Based on the 2002 Bayh-Dole-like reform in China, we conduct the difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis at the university-IPC level and find that China’s 2002 Bayh-Dole Act increased university-owned patents significantly. In addition, universities with higher prestige (supported by Project 211) and located in areas with better market conditions benefit the most from the Act. These findings provide new insights and highlight the importance of considering complementary institutional mechanisms in fulfilling the intended effect of Bayh-Dole like laws. Our research has significant implications for policymakers, especially in developing and transition economies.

Academic spill-ins or spill-outs? Examining knowledge spillovers of university patents

Abstract In this article, we investigate whether academic technology-based knowledge crosses university boundaries or remains trapped inside the ivory tower. To do so, we rely on a matched sample approach to compare the spillovers generated by academic and firm patents using measures that take into account knowledge spilling-in and knowledge spilling-out of academia. Although it is true that knowledge exchanges among universities may inflate the overall spillovers of university patents vis-à-vis firm patents, our results indicate that university patents generate more spillovers than a comparable sample of matched corporate patents, even when knowledge flows among universities are not regarded as spillovers. This suggests that, in our sample, firm technologies more frequently rely on academic patents than on technologies from other corporations. In addition, we find that the gap between university and industry spillovers differs across industries, with industries where patents are important for appropriating returns from R&D (i.e. more economically valuable), such as drugs, presenting a smaller gap than in industries with complex technologies (where firms have strong incentives to patent aggressively), such as computers. Finally, we show that industry patents generate more spillovers locally and that academic knowledge spillovers are less geographically localized than those of corporate research.

University patent policy: tasks and success factors

University patent policy: tasks and success factors

4564 Nilotinib alters microRNAs that regulate specific autophagy and ubiquitination genes in the cerebrospinal fluid of Parkinson’s patients

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Our preclinical data demonstrate that the principal effects of nilotinib, a multi-tyrosine kinase inhibitor, in models of neurodegeneration is clearance of misfolded proteins via autophagy. Here we aimed to evaluate the effects of nilotinib on microRNAs in the cerebrospinal fluid of Parkinson’s disease patients. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) was collected as part of an open label phase I (NCT02281474) (n = 12, 300 mg nilotinib taken orally once daily for 6 months), and a phase II randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study (NCT02954978) (n = 75, randomized 1:1:1 into placebo, 150 mg or 300 mg nilotinib taken orally once daily for 12 months). RNA was isolated from CSF and Indexed sequencing libraries were prepared from total RNA plus miRNA. Next generation whole-genome sequencing (single-end 1x75 bp, 25 million raw reads per sample) was performed to identify miRNAs significantly differentially expressed (fold-change ≥ 2, Benjamini-Hochberg FDR p-value ≤ 0.05 or Empirical Bayes FDR ≤ 0.05) with treatment compared to baseline. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Next generation whole-genome sequencing of microRNAs in the CSF demonstrated that nilotinib significantly increases microRNAs that specifically regulate expression of autophagy and ubiquitination genes in individuals with Parkinson’s disease. In the open label phase I, samples, 28 microRNAs found to regulate autophagy and ubiquitination genes, were significantly altered with treatment (Benjamini-Hochberg FDR p-value ≤ 0.05). In the phase II randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study samples, we verified several of those 28 candidate microRNAs had been significantly deferentially expressed with treatment (Empirical Bayes FDR p-value ≤ 0.05). DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Our data provide robust evidence that nilotinib’s effects on misfolded protein clearance is via autophagy and CSF miRNA sequencing is a valid biomarker of nilotinib’s effects in a definitive phase III study to investigate nilotinib in Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. CONFLICT OF INTEREST DESCRIPTION: Charbel Moussa is listed as an inventor on several Georgetown University patents for the use of tyrosine kinase inhibitors as a treatment for neurodegenerative diseases

D and DD-drop layup optimization of aircraft wing panels under multi-load case design environment

The aerospace industry is on a perpetual drive to optimize structures with developments in modeling and analysis capabilities. The traditionally used laminates with 0°,90°,±45° orientations are called Legacy QUAD Laminates (LQL). The recent discovery of Trace of an orthotropic stress tensor A allows reduction of design variables by the replacement of LQL with equivalent stiffness DD11Stanford University patent pending. (double-double) laminate having self-repeating orientations in a set of ±ϕ/±ψ. The optimized LQL structures are with mid-plane symmetry, excessive ply-migrations, and variability in ply-orientations, which make the manufacturing process cumbersome. On the other hand, DD-laminates are simplified, thinner and free from mid-plane symmetry, thus enable ten-fold reduction in production resources. The present study, an artificial intelligent (AI) genetic-algorithm based stochastic optimizer replaces LQL with DD-laminates, which follows DD-drop design for mass optimization. The optimization algorithm works with unit-circle failure, buckling mode, and wing-tip deflection design criteria and derives optimal-wing with lowest mass, well suited for design requirements in multiple design load-case. The application of algorithm shows 68–70% mass reduction to an initial full-length ply wing-box model of LQL. The minimization of ply-migrations by D/DD-drop optimization yields structures with better resistance for delamination and well suited for automated production.

The innovation value chain of patents: Breakthrough in the patent commercialization trap in Chinese universities.

The innovation value chain is an effective tool for analysing innovation activities and reflects the process of value creation and increase in innovation activities. From the perspective of innovation value chains, we divided patent innovation activities into three stages: knowledge innovation stage, applied research stage and patent commercialization stage. The panel data from 64 universities directly managed by the Ministry of Education from 2009 to 2017 were used and several conclusions were drawn: 1) In the initial stage of knowledge innovation, the fundamental research fund plays a crucial promoting role, and knowledge innovation achievements are mainly published academic papers. 2) In the applied research stage, the knowledge innovation in the early stage and the fund investment in R&D activities have a significant positive effect on the patent output of universities, but the personnel investment has a negative effect. 3) In the final stage of patent commercialization, preliminary research results have a positive impact on patent commercialization, whose marginal effect depends on the industry-university-research relationship, external competition and reputation of the university. The evidence showed that there is a feedback channel between university patent commercialization and knowledge innovation, and new knowledge generated by the interaction with the outside world in the process of patent commercialization was transmitted to the subject of knowledge innovation through this channel, forming a virtuous dynamic cycle. By analysing the driving factors of the value chain of patent innovation in colleges and universities, we provided empirical evidence for the operation mechanism and policy formulation of college patents in China.

Academic contribution to industrial innovation by funding type

Universities are an important actor for innovation. Their contributions to technological and scientific knowledge development have been supported by various types of funding. The current study investigates the impacts of two academic research funding sources—industry and competitive—on academic patents. We measure the effects with two indicators—creation of progenitor inventions and the degree of diffusion. Using a patent database, this paper identifies a progenitor invention if a patent is granted without any backward citations and measures the degree of diffusion with patent citations. Focusing on Japanese university patents, the main finding of this paper is that competitive funding tends to produce progenitor inventions whereas industry funding is not likely to do so. By contrast, inventions produced from competitive funding are not likely to diffuse, whereas those produced from industry funding are likely to diffuse. Based on our findings, we argue that the competitive funding may work better when diffusion mechanism is introduced. An example is to increase academic researchers’ proximity to the industry. Additionally, our findings also imply that when setting new funding or changing academic funding system such as replacing block funding with other types, it is important to understand what kind of outcomes are expected from the funding method.

The Influencing Factors of University Teachers' Willingness to Disclose Inventions - Empirical Study from China

University teachers selectively disclosing inventions leads to a serious loss of high-value inventions in colleges, which seriously hinders the transformation process of university patents. To promote achievement transformation, Sichuan Province took the lead in carrying out the pilot reform of the mixed ownership of employee inventions in universities in China and encouraged professional inventors to transform achievements with property rights. However, whether university teachers are willing to disclose high-quality inventions to universities is unknown, and the stimulating effect of reforms on college teachers remains to be examined. From the perspective of the current situation of university teachers' willingness to disclose inventions in the process of the transformation of university patents, this paper selects teachers from seven universities in Sichuan Province, China, as the objects of the questionnaire, including Sichuan University and Southwest Jiaotong University. The study uses a structural equation model and draws the following conclusions: university teachers' characteristics, incentive mechanisms, and invention characteristics are positively related to their willingness to disclose inventions; enterprise activities are negatively related to university teachers' willingness to disclose inventions; and the influence of patent examination on the intention of invention disclosure is weak.

Models of Technology Transfer for Genome-Editing Technologies.

Many of the fundamental inventions of genome editing, including meganucleases, zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and CRISPR, were first made at universities and patented to encourage commercial development. This gave rise to a diversity of technology transfer models but also conflicts among them. Against a broader historical and policy backdrop of university patenting and special challenges concerning research tools, we review the patent estates of genome editing and the diversity of technology transfer models employed to commercialize them, including deposit in the public domain, open access contracts, material transfer agreements, nonexclusive and exclusive licenses, surrogate licenses, and aggregated licenses. Advantages are found in this diversity, allowing experimentation and competition that we characterize as a federalism model of technology transfer. A notable feature of genome editing has been the rise and success of third-party licensing intermediaries. At the same time, the rapid pace of development of genome-editing technology is likely to erode the importance of patent estates and licensing regimes and may mitigate the effect of overly broad patents, giving rise to new substitutes to effectuate commercialization.

High-Speed Railway and Collaborative Innovation: Evidence from University Patents in China

Geographical distance constitutes friction of searching research collaborators. Taking advantage of a quasi-natural experiment featured by recently connected High-Speed Railway (HSR) lines in China, this paper seeks to identify the impact of a substantial improvement in intercity transportation infrastructure on collaborative innovation across cities, with a focus on university-industry collaboration. The data pertain to a universe of patent applications filed by all universities and colleges in China and their citations during the 1985-2016 period. Using the city-level and applicant pair-level datasets, a variant of the difference-in-differences (DID) model is employed to tease out the causal relationship between HSR and collaborative innovation. We find that HSR contributes to a substantial increase in collaborative patent applications between university and industry and the associated citations. The induced effects are salient in research partners with a closer technological distance or located within a 3-hour to 5-hour HSR traveling distance. Besides, HSR contributes to industry collaboration by utilizing universities’ strong academic disciplines into the related technological fields. Lastly, we find that HSR facilitates universities to search for new research partners with better quality beyond the geographical boundary. The searching of corporate partners is disproportionately affected.