The Expanding Role of University Patenting in the Life Sciences: Assessing the Importance of Experience and Connectivity

We extend debates about the sources of university capabilities at research commercialization. Drawing upon quantitative data for a panel of 89 research-intensive U.S. universities and interview data from two academic licensing offices, we model the relationship between technology transfer experience, embeddedness in biotechnology industry networks, basic science quality and capacity, and citation impact measures of university life science patents. Technology licensing officers draw upon the expertise of corporate partners to evaluate the potential impact of invention disclosures. The information gleaned through network ties to industry enables well-connected institutions to develop higher impact patent portfolios. Reaping the benefits of such connections, however, requires experience in balancing academic and corporate priorities to avoid the danger of ‘capture’ by industrial interests as overly-tight connections limit patent impact. This pattern of diminishing returns to connectivity is robust across multiple citation measures of patent quality. This research is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF grant #0097970) and the Merck Foundation (EPRIS Project). We are grateful to the staff of the two university technology licensing offices that granted us access and gave freely of their time. We appreciate the helpful comments of participants at the Roundtable on Engineering Entrepreneurship Research held at Georgia Tech and from two anonymous reviewers for Research Policy. Any remaining errors are our own.