University engagement in open innovation and intellectual property: evidence from university–industry collaborations

University–industry collaborations are an important pathway through which academic scientists engage with industry and society, co-create new knowledge, and raise funds to carry out costly research endeavors. Nonetheless, the management of such collaborations is challenging and requires universities to protect their investments in intellectual property and to capture value from them. This paper examines how scientists’ motivations to undertake inventive activities shape the relationship between research partnerships, the ownership of academic patents resulting from such partnerships, and the licensing of university-owned patents. We examine the interactions between these factors using data on 501 research projects conducted by scientists affiliated with universities located in various countries. Our analysis indicates that the inventors’ motivations bear a direct effect on the ownership and commercialization of academic patents. Moreover, these motivations positively moderate the relationship between research partnerships and the management of academic patents. These findings have interesting implications for university administrators striving to enhance the effectiveness of the technology transfer process.

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Notes

Following Lissoni et al. (2008), we define academic patents as patents that have one or more university researchers in the list of inventors. We can distinguish two types of academic patents: (a) university-owned patents, i.e., academic patents owned/applied for by universities; (b) university-invented patents, i.e., academic patents owned/applied for by companies, other public research organizations, or individuals.

Throughout this paper we will use the term research partnership, university–industry partnership, and joint-research project as synonymous.

Anecdotal evidence from our setting indicates that some academic inventors take the strategic initiative of working with business partners and foster knowledge exchange through their involvement in knowledge transfer partnership programs. Other inventors have leveraged the results of their research to identify new business opportunities together with TTO staff and technology vendors.

The variable Research experience is highly correlated with the academic position of the surveyed inventor. In unreported analysis, we measured the latter with a dichotomous variable, Faculty member, which equals 1 if the inventor was a faculty member at the time of the invention, and 0 otherwise (e.g., Ph.D student). The correlation between the two variables is equal to 0.64.

It is worth noting that the questions require inventors to exclude interactions with co-inventors and other people belonging to organizations with which there were formal collaborations. Hence, the question allegedly captures different types of relationships with respect to those proxied by Research partnership.

The marginal effect of the interaction term is computed using the procedure described in Karaca-Mandic et al. (2012) and Long and Freese (2014). When computing the marginal effects of the interaction terms, we set all other variables at their observed values.

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Acknowledgements

We have received financial support from the PRIN National Research Programme of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (project #2010H37KAW) and the European Commission [Contract FP7-SSH-2007-1- grant agreement No. 217299].