Academic inventions outside the university
A result of industry sponsorship, consulting or entrepreneurial activities?
Cornelia Lawson
Collegio Carlo Alberto
University of Torino
APE-INV Workshop, Leuven, 11/05/2012
Academic inventions outside the university
In Europe a large proportion of academic inventions are owned by private firms
(Geuna and Nesta, 2006; Lissoni et al., 2008)
UK: 50%
Sweden: 82%
France: 64%
Italy: 74%
Belgian 65%
USA: 24%
Sources: Callaert and van Looy, 2012; Lissoni et al., 2008;
Sterzi, 2012; Thursby et al., 2009
Why are these inventions owned by firms?
Three major explanations:
1.
2.
3.
University Start-Ups
• new company, which may still be owned by the university, facilitating the
commercialisation of the new invention
•
These inventions may less basic, more important and more able to create
immediate financial returns (Thursby et al., 2009)
•
In US 39% are spin-offs (Thursby et al., 2009)
Industry sponsors academic research
• Joint research with IP agreements (Verspagen, 2006; Thursby et al., 2009
•
Knowledge of these agreements is limited and there has been little evidence
confirming the link between sponsorship and patent ownership
•
Positive effect of industry funding on propensity to patent and quality of patents
(Hottenrott and Thorwarth, 2011; Lawson, 2012)
Consulting - bypassing university administration (Thursby et al., 2009)
What I want to contribute
1. Identify companies that own academic patents and match them to sponsors of
academic research.
2. Find measures for these three activities to predict firm ownership of academic
patents.
Data
Basis of data (Banal-Estanol et al., 2010):
Engineering Departments: 80 universities with engineering
Academic Researchers: Names and Ranks from University calendars and outdated websites
using www.archive.org
Final dataset: 40 universities, 5172 researchers, 1985-2007
In this work I use reduced sample of 13 universities:
Academics: 744 academics, 2001-2007
Patents: All EPO, UKIPO, US patent applications (2001-2008)
Funding: PI, sponsor, amount, start and end year (2001-2007)
Publications: ISI (2001-2007)
Personal Information: PhD Year, PhD Subject (theses.org) Gender, Rank
University Characteristics: HE-BCI (2003-2007)
Data
Patents: 176 inventors, 467 patents
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 27
Firm assigned patents
249 patents (53%) assigned to private firm
Owners: 115 companies, size and ownership from company register
Firm Characteristics
# firms
# patents
micro-entity (<10 employees)
33
61
small firm (<50 employees)
18
50
medium-sized firm (<250 employees)
10
37
large firm
54
109
Total
115
257
Firm assigned patents
Scientific Field: PhD information available for 687 researchers
#
academics
#
inventors
%
# inventors
w. industry
owned
patent
%
#
industry
owned
patents
#
patents
per
inventor
electrical and electronic
engineering
physics
147
56
38.1%
30
53.6%
106
3.5
104
32
30.8%
18
56.3%
66
3.7
civil engineering
134
18
13.4%
11
61.1%
17
1.5
mechanical engineering
92
13
14.1%
8
61.5%
15
1.9
chemical engineering
98
26
26.5%
15
57.7%
26
1.7
life sciences
48
12
25.0%
5
41.7%
15
3.0
no PhD / unknown subject
area
Total
64
7
10.9%
4
57.1%
10
2.5
687
164
23.9%
91
55.4%
255
2.8
Subject Area
Firm assignees and links to academics
1. Spin-Off
• Account for 106 patents (43% of industry owned patents)
Firm Characteristics
# firms
Firm is
university
spin-off
micro-entity (1-10 employees)
33
20
small firm (11-50 employees)
18
8
medium-sized firm (51-250)
10
4
large firm (250+)
54
0
Total
115
32
Firm assignees and links to academics
2. Industry sponsor:
• 454 researchers are PI, 279 held at least one industry grant, overall
617 grants from 420 different companies
Firm Characteristics
# firms
Firm is
university
spin-off
Firm
sponsors
research
micro-entity (1-10 employees)
33
20
1
small firm (11-50 employees)
18
8
4
medium-sized firm (51-250)
10
4
2
large firm (250+)
54
0
24
Total
115
32
31
Firm sponsors research
31
5
-
Firm assignees and links to academics
Firm Characteristics
# firms
Firm is
university
spin-off
Firm
Firm is cono link to
sponsors assignee on researcher
research
patent
micro-entity (1-10 employees)
33
20
1
0
13
small firm (11-50 employees)
18
8
4
3
7
medium-sized firm (51-250)
10
4
2
0
5
large firm (250+)
54
0
24
10
27
Total
115
32
31
13
51
Firm sponsors research
31
5
-
8
-
Empirical analysis
Bivariate probit of probability to file a patent with the university or a firm. As a researcher
has the choice between two (or more) outcomes, their standard errors are not independent
and therefore require me to estimate them simultaneously. I employ Maximum Simulated
Likelihood Method using the GHK simulator using the user-written command cmp in Stata
(Roodman, 2009).
Each observation is a patent filing event. There can be more than one observation per
researcher and even multiple observation per year per researcher.
If a patent has more than one inventor who is an academic in my dataset, I consider the most
senior inventor.
Q: How can we predict ownership?
Patent characteristics are ex-post and may in fact be determined by the patent applicant,
directly (claims, family size) or indirectly (citations)
Empirical analysis
Propose to predict firm ownership with measures for the different possible explanations of
firm ownership.
1. Spin-Off
•
Entrepreneurial culture of a university: Number of newly formed (SPINNEW) and active
(SPINTOT) formal start-ups in year t (whether university owned or not).
•
Culture of appropriation: Number of patents filed in t (UNIPAT) and universities cumulative
patent portfolio (UNIPATSTOCK)
•
Stock/Share of regional development grants
2. Industry sponsored research
•
Stock/Share of funding from industry
3. Consulting
•
?
University Ownership
•
Stock/Share of funding from public sponsors (research councils / charities)
•
Stock of publications
Variables
Patent Owner
University
Firm
Project characteristics
INDFUND
PUBFUND
TTFUND
INDSHARE
PUBSHARE
TTSHARE
PUBSTOCK
Personal characteristics
NOPHD
AGE (Years since PhD)
FEMALE
PROFESSOR
ELEC
Institutional characteristics
SPINNEW
SPINTOT
UNIPAT
UNIPATSTOCK
mean
Sd
min
max
count
0.41
0.56
0.49
0.50
0.0
0.0
1
1
302
302
29.68
40.83
2.42
0.22
0.29
0.04
19.45
92.11
125.38
9.21
0.29
0.35
0.16
24.17
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
613
1285
72
1
1
1
131
302
302
302
302
302
302
302
0.05
20.02
0.05
0.56
0.63
0.21
9.66
0.22
0.50
0.48
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
1
44
1
1
1
302
302
302
302
302
3.95
25.88
46.69
187.21
3.60
14.79
38.16
151.82
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
16
54
112
600
302
302
302
302
VARIABLES
Project characteristics
INDFUND
PUBFUND
TTFUND
University Patent
Firm Patent
-0.002**
[0.001]
0.000
[0.001]
0.018*
[0.009]
0.002*
[0.001]
-0.001
[0.001]
-0.009
[0.011]
INDSHARE
AGE
AGE2
FEMALE
PROFESSOR
ELEC
Institutional Characteristics
SPINNEW
SPINTOT
UNIPAT
UNIPATSTOCK
Constant
Rho
Observations
log Likelihood
0.754**
[0.380]
-0.889***
[0.277]
-0.191
[0.703]
-0.010**
[0.004]
0.008
[0.006]
-0.011*
[0.007]
0.429
[0.979]
-0.047
[0.055]
0.001
[0.001]
-0.243
[0.339]
0.389
[0.294]
-0.146
[0.218]
-0.629
[0.926]
-0.022
[0.060]
0.000
[0.001]
0.101
[0.344]
0.054
[0.274]
0.097
[0.223]
-0.045
[0.959]
-0.071
[0.056]
0.001
[0.001]
-0.464
[0.352]
0.432
[0.289]
-0.176
[0.225]
0.026
[0.877]
0.014
[0.056]
-0.000
[0.001]
0.447
[0.361]
0.025
[0.263]
0.123
[0.223]
-0.030
[0.032]
-0.055**
[0.027]
-0.010
[0.009]
-0.002
[0.002]
1.531
[0.976]
0.026
[0.030]
0.075***
[0.027]
0.026**
[0.011]
-0.001
[0.002]
-1.322
[1.010]
-0.042
[0.030]
-0.059**
[0.029]
-0.010
[0.010]
-0.002
[0.002]
2.093**
[0.997]
0.038
[0.029]
0.083***
[0.029]
0.021**
[0.011]
-0.000
[0.002]
-2.072**
[1.003]
TTSHARE
Individual Characteristics
NOPHD
Firm Patent
-0.512
[0.347]
0.618*
[0.323]
0.755
[0.730]
0.005
[0.005]
PUBSHARE
PUBSTOCK
University Patent
-2.174***
302
-258.0
Robust standard errors in brackets, clustered at the individual level. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
-2.225***
302
-248.7
Conclusions
Descriptive results showed that 28% of firms are university start-ups. Another 27% of firms
have sponsored academic research or have other joint agreements to market university
inventions.
However, 45% of firms do not have any apparent link to researchers that could explain the
ownership of university inventions.
While the university loses the opportunity of potential profits in the future it is able to secure
some financing for on-going research.
Though firms sponsoring academic research do not own academic patents, industry funding
has a positive effect on industry ownership of patents.
Entrepreneurial culture of the university has a positive effect on firm ownership indicating
that a university’s IP strategy may be important.