The Nexus between Science and Industry: Evidence From Faculty Inventions

Abstract

OR 0909 Non-technical summaryIt is largely documented that public science has a positive impact on industrial innovation. Previous studies, for instance, provide evidence for enhanced corporate patenting and improved new product and process development in the corporate sector through scientific research results. However, most of these empirical studies focus on the U.S.For the European Economic Area, scholars and policy makers are rather sceptical with respect to emphasizing a large impact of science on corporate innovation: it has been claimed for about a decade that a so-called "European Paradox" exists. It describes the phenomenon that EU countries play a leading global role in terms of top-level scientific output, but lag behind in the ability of converting this strength into wealthgenerating innovations in the business sector.In this paper, we investigate the nexus between science and industry in order to identify potential problems of technology transfer from academia to industry in the European area. Focusing on the "paper trail" from academia to industry in terms of patent applications, we compare academic inventions that are patented in the scientific domain with those that are directly transferred to industry and hence, although invented by an academic patented by a firm.Our analysis of a sample of more than 4000 academic inventions by German professors suggests that there is indeed potential for improving science-industry interactions in Europe. Concretely, our results show that academic inventions assigned to corporations are rather applied and associated with short-run profits, while academic inventions patented by the academic sector are rather complex and exhibit a higher long-term value. This suggests that firms miss the opportunity to invest in basic technologies that promise higher returns in the long run. We interpret this finding as a lack of absorptive capacity by corporations that do not succeed in identifying and exploiting basic university inventions. April 2009 Abstract Against the background of the so-called "European paradox", i.e. the conjecture that EU countries lack the capability to transfer science into commercial innovations, knowledge transfer from academia to industry has been a central issue in policy debates recently. Based on a sample of German scientists we investigate which academic inventions are patented by a scientific assignee and which are owned by corporate entities. Our findings suggest that faculty patents assigned to corporations exhibit a higher short-term value in terms of forward citations and a higher potential to block property rights of competitors. Faculty patents assigned to academic inventors or to public research institutions, in contrast, are more complex, more basic and have stronger links to science. These results may suggest that European firms lack the absorptive capacity to identify and exploit academic inventions that are further away from market applications. The Nexus Between

The determinants of academic patenting by Italian universities

“…Converging findings indicate a positive effect of collaborating with industry in becoming an inventor of patents (Lawson 2013;Hottenrott and Lawson 2012). Such effects are seen to be positive and significant both on university owned-and on firm-owned patents (Czarnitzki, Hussinger and Schneider 2012;Lawson 2013).…”

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