Copyright © The Authors 2007. Published by Oxford University Press.
University licensing
* Georgia Institute of Technology, e-mail: jerry.thursby{at}mgt.gatech.edu
** Georgia Institute of Technology and NBER, e-mail: marie.thursby{at}mgt.gatech.edu
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Abstract |
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Licensing of university inventions to industry has experienced rapid, recent growth. This growth is cited as evidence of university success in technology transfer and it suggests an increasing importance of universities to innovation systems. Concerns have been raised that universities are moving towards applied research and away from fundamental research in efforts to capture licensing income. However, figures on growth in licensing perhaps paint a misleading picture, given the substantial variation in licensing success across universities, scientific fields, and technologies. The paper is organized around the following questions. What is the rationale behind university patenting and licensing? How embryonic are university inventions and how often is further development necessary? What is the record on exclusive versus non-exclusive licensing? What is the record on licensing revenue? What are university licensing goals? What is the role of faculty after a licence is signed? Have faculty been diverted from their traditional role in research?
Key Words: university science • patents • licences
Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation (SES 0 094 573), the Alan and Mildred Peterson Foundation, and the Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation. This paper is an extension of prior work in Thursby and Thursby (2007a).
1 The starting year is defined as the year in which there was at least a half-time employee dedicated to licensing.
2 An invention disclosure is the formal document filed with the TTO by a faculty member when the faculty member believes she has an invention with commercial potential.
3 This includes sponsored research funds tied to licences.
4 If the research funding behind an invention is provided by the US government, then the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 requires that licensing revenue be split between the university and the faculty inventors. The university portion of revenue can only be spent on research.
5 The university survey was conducted jointly with Richard Jensen. For details on survey design and response rates see Jensen and Thursby (2001) and Thursby et al. (2001).
6 For details, see Thursby and Thursby (2002, 2003).
7 Hall et al. (2001) find that the complementary relationship between invention and disclosure incentives in academia serves as a barrier to the formation of university–industry partnerships.
8 The norms of science are most closely associated with the work of Merton (see, for example, Merton, 1973).
9 This is all contingent, of course, on the availability of research funds. Government patronage of university research is the norm in developed economies. While one might argue that such funding is insufficient and that university licensing income is necessary to fund research, it is the case that at least in the USA the income from licensing is small in relation to other sources of research funding.
10 Specifically, we asked about technologies that were ‘not successful’, where an unsuccessful technology is one that did not fit the need anticipated at the time of the licence—as an example, it did not reach the royalty stage.
11 We asked for reasons behind the failure of university technologies. Forty-seven per cent indicated a failure of the technology, 26 per cent noted that the lag time to market application was longer than expected and 13 per cent indicated that the technology would infringe on the intellectual property of others. Eighteen per cent of the time failure of a technology was related to the failure of a faculty member to deliver know-how or cooperate in further development.
12 A small firm is an established firm with fewer than 500 employees.
13 It is the case that some universities return a portion of the income to the inventor's lab to support its research. It is our understanding that reimbursed legal fees are excluded as income from which inventors derive their share.
14 Here and in what follows we drop the response for the University of California System since they answer for a number of major research institutions and inclusion of their response would skew the analysis.
15 In a simple regression of the number of support staff as a function of the number of professionals in the office, the coefficient is 1.496 (p-value is 0.000) and the R2 is 0.869.
16 Results using 1996 data are similar.
17 For an analysis of these objectives, see Jensen and Thursby (2001), Thursby et al. (2001), and Jensen et al. (2003).
18 For more on the objectives of universities, see Thursby and Kemp (2002).
19 A more complete analysis of six of these universities is found in Thursby and Thursby (2007b).
20 One-half of the firms in our industry survey noted that they include delay-of-publication clauses in at least 90 per cent of their university contracts. The average delay is nearly 4 months, with some firms requiring as much as a year's delay.
21 We started with 1983 so as to be well past the date of passage of the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980. Universities supplied us with data as far back as disclosure information could easily be retrieved. The 1996 end was for Purdue University. Purdue was the basis for our pilot study in this project and that pilot was initiated in 1997, hence we only collected data through 1996.
22 In a regression of the fraction of rated publications (where we drop observations with no publications, rated or otherwise) on a set of indicator variables for the year of the observation, we found an R2 of only 0.0016 and very few significant differences in the coefficients of early versus later years.
23 An odds ratio gives the effect of a unit change in a right-hand-side variable on the ratio of the probability of a disclosure divided by one minus the probability of a disclosure. Hence, an odds ratio of less than one implies that the right-hand-side variable has a negative effect on the probability of disclosure.
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