Abstract
Foreign-born academic scientists have been consistently shown to be more productive than the native-born in the United States with regard to research and patents. However, no study has yet analyzed whether the foreign-born are also more likely to commercialize their research after having it patented. This paper utilizes a 2010 survey of academic inventors to analyze whether a selected patent had been licensed or whether technology transfer offices were currently working with a company. Additional analysis was conducted to understand where patents were held (whether by a private company, spinoff, government, or university) for those patents that had been successfully licensed in the past. Findings show that the foreign-born are generally less likely to have their patents licensed or to be working with technology transfer offices, though the significance of the results are mixed. In addition, the foreign-born are more likely to have their licenses held by private companies, while the native-born are more likely to work with spinoffs. These results indicate that technology transfer offices can better serve a key part of the academic workforce.
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Notes
The sampling frame for the survey which provided the core data used in this study contained both a patentor sample and the non-patentor sample. The patentor sample targets the population of scientists and engineers who are listed as inventors on the U.S. patents assigned to U.S. universities or affiliated foundations/hospitals in 2006. The list of such patentors was developed based on a review of the Patents CLASS CD-ROM, with those removed who did not have contact information or who were no longer employed by academic institution. That provided 3034 patentors, of which 1600 were randomly selected to be surveyed. In order to investigate the difference between scientists and engineers who patent and those who do not patent in terms of their perceptions and attitudes towards university patenting, we construct a non-patentor sample by pairing each patentor with a randomly selected non-patentor from the patentor's university department. The data has previously been used in three studies. Huang et al. (2011) studied how department incentives and individual characteristics impacted whether an academic-scientist held a patent while Wu et al. (2015) studied inventors attitudes towards the commercialization of their research. In this study we focus on differences between the native and foreign-born, which neither previous study had done, and only focus on the sample of respondents that held a patent rather than the reasons that predict whether an individual has patented. The third study, Hayter and Feeney (2017), focused on inventors, but sought to understand why scientists patented externally rather than within their university and did not look at differences based on nationality.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments on the earlier versions of this article. The survey data analyzed in this article were collected under the auspices of the research project titled “Patenting Behavior of Academic Scientists and Engineers: A Microlevel Analysis of the Factors that Determine the Production of University Patents” (NSF Grant # SES-0750613, 2008-2010, PI Eric Welch). Additional data collection and analysis were supported through the research project “Connecting Nuances of Foreign Status, Professional Networks, and Higher Education” (NSF Grant, DGE #1661206, 2017-2020, PI Eric Welch).
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Appendices
Appendix 1
Uniquenesses | |
Commercial | 0.611 |
Technological | 0.014 |
Scholarly | 0.741 |
Loadings | |
Factor 1 | |
Commercial | 0.624 |
Technological | 0.993 |
Scholarly | 0.509 |
Factor 1 | |
SS loadings | 1.634 |
Proportion variation | 0.545 |
Appendix 2
Uniquenesses | |
Emails | 0.660 |
Visit | 0.696 |
Face-to-face | 0.291 |
Loadings | |
Factor 1 | |
Emails | 0.583 |
Visit | 0.552 |
Face-to-face | 0.842 |
Factor 1 | |
SS loadings | 1.353 |
Proportion variation | 0.451 |
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van Holm, E.J., Jung, H. & Welch, E.W. The impacts of foreignness and cultural distance on commercialization of patents. J Technol Transf 46, 29–61 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-020-09775-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-020-09775-9