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Does technological diversification spur university patenting?

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Abstract

Technological diversity, or the breadth of technological knowledge embedded in patented inventions, refers to the range of different technological or economic fields covered by a patent. This paper explores the role of diversification scope in encouraging the production of new patents in European universities by including the diversification scope as an explanatory variable in a patent production function. We hypothesize that the more diversified the patented technology in the university, the greater the production of new patents in subsequent periods. To test this hypothesis we rely on a cross-sectional sample of patents owned by 141 European universities across Europe in 2001–2004. Our empirical findings support the hypothesis of diversification, which means that the production of new patents can be spurred by promoting or stimulating greater levels of technological diversification. This result is robust to both the use of various measures of diversification and to different econometric specifications.

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Notes

  1. Geuna and Nesta (2006) concluded that the number of university-invented patents is higher than the number of patents owned by universities. Lissoni et al. (2008) provide figures to show that university-owned patents in France, Italy and Sweden constitute no more than 10 % of all academic patents (most patent ownership lies with firms), although this can be as high as 69 % in the US. Recently, some European countries have introduced legislative changes in an attempt to retain the rights of invention where universities produce the information included in patents; see Geuna and Rossi (2011) for a discussion.

  2. There are two issues that we had to solve. First, sometimes the college appears as applicant instead of the university. Second, it is common that different names and/or abbreviations for the university appear as applicant of the patent. To avoid losing information we elaborated a complete list of universities (and colleges) considering different abbreviations as well. (This list is available upon request).

  3. Although the first search was performed using the Derwent Innovation Index, we have recently checked and compared the entire information with another database (PATSTAT), with little change with respect to our original data.

  4. Available at http://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/general/.

  5. For example, when the number of patents owned by the university is large, let us say 1000, the weight factor is near 1 (p/p − 1 = 1000/999) and entroipc is equal to entroipcw; however, if the number of patents is small, e.g. 5, the weight factor is 1.25 [p/(p − 1) = 5/4], which means that entroipcw is larger than entroipc for universities with a small number of patents.

  6. As is well known, the SCI is a bibliographical database produced by the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), which is in turn a part of Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science. The main advantage of ISI citation indexes is that they provide a complete list of all authors and their affiliations.

  7. Other alternatives have been proposed in the literature, for example when the fraction of zeros is too high to be compatible with standard underlying count data, zero inflated models or hurdle models can be a good option. But in our analysis it is not appropriate to estimate this model as our sample contains 12.8 % of zeros.

  8. The estimated models for the sensibility analysis and the additional Poisson models are not presented, but are available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

The authors highly appreciate the helpful comments of an anonymous Reviewer, which significantly contributed to improving the clarity and quality of the paper. We are also grateful for the financial assistance provided by Junta de Andalucía.

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  1. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, University of Cadiz, Duque de Nájera, 8, 11002, Cádiz, Spain

    Manuel Acosta, Daniel Coronado & M. Ángeles Martínez

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  1. Manuel Acosta
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Acosta, M., Coronado, D. & Martínez, M.Á. Does technological diversification spur university patenting?. J Technol Transf 43, 96–119 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-015-9414-y

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