Key licensing technologies for patents based on university– industry collaboration

Abstract

Purpose As the university–industry collaboration (UIC) gradually attracts the attention of various national governments, the number of studies on UIC has increased substantially. Past UIC studies have mostly focused on investigating the incentives and the motivation for UIC, forms of UIC and performance output of UIC. However, they have not actively identified the key technologies and technology distribution that are conductive to the commercialization of UIC outcomes. Therefore, this study aims to adopt the licensed UIC patents as the basis for analysis and to construct a patent licensing technology network. Design/methodology/approach This study focused on licensed patents because past studies have indicated that such patents usually have higher value. Moreover, patent licensing can be seen as the final step for the commercialization of UIC outcomes. Finally, past studies have rarely explored patent examiners’ views on key technologies. However, during the substantive examination of patents, patent examiners often use their background knowledge regarding the technology to include citations to other patented technologies that they consider valuable or indispensable. Therefore, this study focused on investigating the patents recognized and cited by patent examiners and conducted key technology identification. Findings The results indicated that past key technologies in UIC focused on surveying, medicine, biochemistry and electric digital data processing; these fields are crucial to the commercialization of key UIC technologies. Finally, the USA, Japan, Sweden and Germany play critical roles in the network of global university–industry cooperation and technology licensing. Originality/value Patent examiners’ perspectives were adopted to establish a patent licensing technology network, through which the key technologies that could promote UIC patent licensing were mined. This study can also serve as a reference for resource allocation in university research and development and for governments to promote new technologies.

Technology management for innovation in organizations: an argumentation-based modified TISM approach

“…Organizations need to identify and manage technology transfer activities to ensure the production of new products and services (Bozeman, 2000). In a competitive global marketplace, organizations are increasingly seeking technical and R&D alliances (Contractor and Woodley, 2015) to develop their organizational capability (Björkdahl and Börjesson, 2012; Contractor and Woodley, 2015), technical know-how, skills and new production methods that are considered critical to driving innovations within organizations (Chang, 2019). The primary objective of any technology transfer is to introduce new technologies and methods, improve existing technologies and generate new knowledge (Hsiao et al , 2017) that are believed to promote innovation activities within organizations (Masa'deh et al , 2016; Novickis et al , 2017).…”

“…For example, the knowledge gained from technological alliances facilitates organizational learning (Norman, 2004) and innovation within organizations (Dhir et al , 2019). In a competitive global marketplace, organizations are increasingly seeking technical and R&D alliances to develop their organizational capability (Björkdahl and Börjesson, 2012), technical know-how, skills and new production methods that are considered critical to driving innovations within organizations (Chang, 2019). This study also enhances the modified TISM methodology by adding argumentation and total interpretation of the relationships among the identified factors.…”

Network analysis of collaboration in networked universities

“…There are several studies that have analyzed the collaboration among universities, industries and government (Chang, 2019; Choe and Lee, 2017; Choi et al , 2015; Lyu et al , 2019; Wakabayashi and Takai, 2017; Yoon, 2015; Yoon et al , 2017; Yoon and Park, 2017; Yun and Lee, 2013; Zhang et al , 2016b). Particularly, social network analysis (SNA) approach has been used to study the collaboration in these contexts.…”