David C. Mowery

Introduction to the Special Issue on University Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer

Since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, U.S. universities have increased their efforts in formal technology transfer and licensing, and in some cases, investments in new firms. During the last 20 years, the number of universities engaged in technology licensing has increased eightfold, to more than 200, and the volume of university patents has increased fourfold. Moreover, much of this activity involves efforts by “start-up” and small, young, technology-intensive firms to commercialize technologies developed by university faculty, staff, and students. For example, the Association of University Technology Managers reports that the share of member-university inventions licensed to new firms has increased every year since the group began to keep records in the early 1990s. Other anecdotal evidence suggests that investments by venture capital firms in technology firms founded by university students and faculty have grown significantly during this period. Despite the growth in both formal and informal entrepreneurial activities involving university inventions over the past 20 years, little scholarly research has explored this topic. Recently, scholars from several different academic disciplines and universities have begun to systematically study and document commercial technology transfer and university entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, the interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry means that a variety of analytic frameworks and methodologies have been employed, limiting the development of well-established empirical findings and resulting in a fragmented set of observations. To facilitate a cross-disciplinary discussion of findings on this topic, we organized a conference at the DuPree College of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology in December 2000 to discuss a set of papers about university entrepreneurship and technology transfer. The conference brought together researchers from a range of backgrounds, including students of strategic management and organization theory, and economists, historians, and sociologists of technical change. The papers employed a variety of methodologies, including qualitative, interview-based techniques, regression analyses of survey data, and sophisticated econometric analyses of archival data. The empirical analyses employed different units of analysis, such as the individual invention, the university, firms, or industries, in examining university technology transfer and entrepreneurship. We hope that the resulting collection of papers will provide a foundation for the accumulation of knowledge on this topic across a variety of disciplines and perspectives.

The Non-Globalization of Innovation in the Semiconductor Industry

The global semiconductor industry is undergoing several forms of structural change simultaneously. The structure of market demand is shifting from one dominated by personal computers to a more diverse array of heterogeneous niches, largely resulting from global diffusion of the Internet and wireless communications applications. The structure of manufacturing activities is shifting from one dominated by integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) that both design and manufacture semiconductor components to one characterized by vertical specialization, where many firms specialize in either design and marketing (fabless firms) or manufacturing (foundries). Finally, market demand and technical expertise are growing in geographic regions (e.g., Malaysia, Singapore, the Peoples Republic of China, etc.) that formerly were much less prominent actors in the global industry. We examine the influence of these three overlapping trends on the geographic structure of R&D in this industry, using data on patenting and offshore investment by firms in development fabs from 1994 to 2004.

Pioneering Inventors or Thicket Builders: Which U.S. Firms Use Continuations in Patenting?

Why do firms use continuations in the prosecution of their patents? Motivated by the widespread use of continuations by U.S. firms and the prominence of this procedure in U.S. patent policy debates, we investigate the influence of corporate and patent characteristics on the use of continuations. We employ novel data on applicants and their filings of three types of continuations - the continuation application (CAP), the continuations in part (CIP), and divisions - during 1981-2000 to distinguish among the motives for continuing patents. We find that CIPs are disproportionately filed by research and development-intensive firms that patent heavily, and that these continuations are more common in chemical and biological technologies. Patents issuing from CIPs cover relatively important inventions and their use appears consistent with a strategy of protecting pioneering inventions. In contrast, CAPs and divisions are associated with less important patents assigned to capital-intensive firms, particularly in computer and semiconductor fields, and appear to be used in defensive patenting strategies. We analyze the effects of the 1995 change in patent term, and find that the act reduced continuations overall and shifted the output of continuations toward less important patents.

Numbers, Quality, and Entry: How Has the Bayh-Dole Act Affected U.S. University Patenting and Licensing?

This paper summarizes the results of empirical analyses of data on the characteristics of the pre- and post-1980 patents of three leading U.S. academic patenters-the University of California, Stanford University, and Columbia University. We complemented this analysis of these institutions with an analysis of the characteristics of the patents issued to all U.S. universities before and after 1980. Our analysis suggests that the effects of the Bayh-Dole Act on the content of academic research and patenting at Stanford and the University of California were modest. The most significant change in the content of research at these universities, one associated with increased patenting and licensing at both universities before and after 1980, was the rise of biomedical research and inventive activity, but Bayh-Dole had little to do with this growth. Indeed, the rise in biomedical research and inventions in both of these universities predates the passage of Bayh-Dole. Both UC and Stanford university administrators intensified their efforts to market faculty inventions in the wake of Bayh-Dole. This enlargement of the pool of marketed inventions appears to have reduced the average yield (defined as the share of license contracts yielding positive revenues) of this population at both universities. But we find no decline in the importance or generality of the post-1980 patents of these two universities. The analysis of overall U.S. university patenting suggests that the patents issued to institutions that entered into patenting and licensing after the effective date of the Bayh-Dole Act are indeed less important and less general than the patents issued before and after 1980 to U.S. universities with longer experience in patenting. Inexperienced academic patenters appear to have obtained patents that proved to be less significant (in terms of the rate and breadth of their subsequent citations) than those issuing to more experienced university patenters. Bayh-Doles effects on entry therefore may be as important as any effects of the Act on the internal research culture of U.S. universities in explaining the widely remarked decline in the importance and generality of U.S. academic patents after 1980.

Politics and Funding in the U.S. Public Biomedical R&D System

1797 POLICYFORUM F ederal funding for biomedical R&D through the National Institutes of Health has grown from

The commercialisation of national laboratory technology through the formation of "spin-off" firms: evidence from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

8.3 billion in FY1984 to

SUBMARINES AND TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION: U.S. CONTINUATION PATENTING IN SOFTWARE AND BIOTECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGIES IN THE 1980s AND 1990s

28.7 billion in FY2008 (1, 2). The NIH supports half of all federal nondefense R&D and more than 60% of federally funded research in American universities (3). The agency awards funds to research performers based on peer review but the decisions are not insulated from political influence. How do congressional appropriations committee members influence the allocation of federal funding for biomedical research? We investigated this question by studying congressional appropriations bills and appropriations committee meeting reports covering the 20 fiscal years between 1984 and 2003. During every year of this period, the director of the NIH negotiated with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget within the Executive Office of the President to craft a budget request for the NIH that was consistent with White House priorities. The NIHs budget is considered by the Appropriations Committees of the House and Senate. In the House Appropriations Committee (HAC), the NIH budget request is handled by the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee (LHHE). A similarly named subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) evaluates the NIH budget request in that chamber. The LHHE subcommittees consider the NIH budget request, amend the funding requests in the presidential budget, and mark up the appropriations bills, sometimes specifically for institutes and centers at the NIH, that are ultimately reported to the House and Senate by each chambers appropriations committee. The subcommittee meeting reports that accompany the appropriations bills to the floor contain additional detail and guidance on the allocation and disbursement of appropriated funds by the NIH. Transfers affecting the level of support may involve (i) reallocation for NIH funding among the agencys institutes and centers , (ii) subcommittee support for specific fields of biomedical research associated with particular diseases, and (iii) project-level transfers that reallocate funding among particular lines of research and/or research projects within a given disease field. (See Supporting Online Material for examples). To test whether these reallocations are affected by representation on the relevant appropriations subcommittees and committees , we analyzed data on the amount of NIH peer-reviewed grants received by 8310 extramural bio-medical research institutions for every congressional NIH appropriations bill during the 1984–2003 period (4, 5). The primary …

Firm Size and R&D Intensity: a Re-Examination

This paper examines the role of Lawrence Livermore National (LLNL), a major US Department of Energy nuclear weapons research facility, in spawning spin-off firms. We provide some of the most comprehensive estimates of the number of spin-off firms associated with LLNL and find that this research facility appears to be at least as important a source of spin-off firms as are three defence-oriented laboratories in New Mexico with a combined budget that is substantially larger than that of LLNL. Our survey of these LLNL spin-off firms suggests that fewer than one-quarter of them are directly engaged in the commercialisation of LLNL-developed technologies, a finding that is broadly consistent with the results of other studies. Finally, our interviews with spin-off founders suggest that management and other policy-related impediments to the formation of spin-off firms reduce the contribution of these firms to the commercialisation of LLNL-developed technologies.

The Geographic Reach of Market and Non-Market Channels of Technology Transfer: Comparing Citations and Licenses of University Patents

This chapter examines the role of “continuations” (procedural revisions of patent applications) within software patents and overall patenting in the United States during 1987–1999. Our research represents the first effort of which we are aware to analyse data on continuations in software or any other patent class, and as such provides information on the effects of 1995 changes in the U.S. patent law intended to curb “submarine patenting.” Our analysis of all U.S. patents issued 1987–1999 shows that the use of continuations grew steadily in overall U.S. patenting through 1995, with particularly rapid growth in continuations in software patenting. Sharp reversals in these growth rates after 1995 suggest that changes in the U.S. patent law were effective. Continuations were used more intensively by packaged-software firms prior to the effective date of the 1995 changes in patent law than by other patentees, and both software and non-software patents subject to continuation tend to be more valuable.