Commercializing Academic Research: The Quality of Faculty Patenting

The knowledge produced by academic scientists has been identified as a potential
key driver of technological progress. Recent policies in Europe aim at increasing
commercially orientated activities in academe. Based on a sample of German scientists
across all fields of science, we investigate the importance of academic
patenting. Our findings suggest that academic involvement in patenting results
in a citation premium, as academic patents appear to generate more forward
citations. We also find that in the European context of changing research objectives
and funding sources since the mid-1990s, the “importance” of academic
patents declines over time. We show that academic entrants have patents of
lower “quality” than academic incumbents but they did not cause the decline,
since the relative importance of patents involving academics with an existing
patenting history declined over time as well. Moreover, a preliminary evaluation
of the effects of the abolishment of the “professor privilege” (the German counterpart
of the US Bayh-Dole Act) reveals that this legal disposition led to an acceleration
of this apparent decline.