The Impact of Academic Patenting on the Rate, Quality, and Direction of (Public) Research Output

Abstract

We examine the influence of faculty patenting activity on the rate, quality, and content of public research outputs in a panel dataset spanning the careers of 3,862 academic life scientists. Using inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTW) to account for the dynamics of self-selection into patenting, we find that patenting has a positive effect on the rate of publication of journal articles, but no effect on the quality of these publications. Using several measures of the "patentability" of the content of research papers, we also find that patenters may be shifting their research focus to questions of commercial interest. We conclude that the often-voiced concern that patenting in academe has a nefarious effect on public research output is, at least in its simplest form, misplaced.

Do scientists get fundamental research ideas by solving practical problems?

“…If the results obtained here are confirmed by further studies, they may help to shed light on recent findings pointing at a positive impact of inventive activities on publications (Azoulay et al, 2006;Breschi et al, 2007;Calderini et al, 2008). Based on the findings herein presented, one can make the hypothesis that the boosting effect of patents is observed because a large share of academic inventions are in fact patented improvements of laboratory technologies and machines, paving the way to advances in understanding.…”

“…Moreover, much to the amazement of people both within and without the scientific community, several empirical investigations have recently been presented to support the view that the work of applying scientific knowledge to industrial uses is not necessarily distracting scientists from their original tasks. According to empirical investigations at the individual level, on average, professor-inventors were found to be more efficient (produced more scientific articles) (Stephan et al, 2006;Fabrizio and Di Minin, 2004) and better cited (Agrawal and Henderson, 2002) than their non-inventive colleagues, with apparently no decline in the level of journals targeted (in terms of Journal Impact Factor and Level of Basicness) (Azoulay et al, 2006;Breschi et al, 2007;Calderini et al, 2008 1 ). In addition, there are hints that productivity may increase in coincidence with the event of patenting (Azoulay et al, 2007;Breschi et al, 2007;Calderini et al, 2007), and that such increase may not necessarily be only temporary (Breschi et al, 2006).…”

The Role of Patents for Bridging the Science to Market Gap

“…We allow for the fact that the scientist has some tacit knowledge that makes it worthwhile to involve her in the development process. 5 Throughout the paper we use the subscripts S and F respectively for scientists and …rms. The 4 It is trivial to extend the model to allow the discovery to still have some value without the development by another …rm.…”

“…All that matters for the model is that search and subsequent development by another …rm is more e¢ cient. 5 The work of Arora (1995Arora ( , 1996 emphasizes the importance of tacit knowledge, and shows how patenting can further support the transfer of tacit knowledge.…”

Sur les conséquences du brevet d’invention dans la science : résultats d’une enquête auprès des inventeurs académiques français

“…Néanmoins, certaines études mettent en avant l'existence d'un effet d'éviction de la recherche fondamentale au profit de la recherche appliquée (Azoulay et al, 2006). Czarnitzki et al (2009), par exemple, tiennent compte de l'hétérogénéité des activités de brevet et démontrent, sur des données allemandes, que les brevets détenus par des universités ne diminuent pas la performance des scientifiques mais que, par contre, les brevets détenus par des partenaires industriels induisent un effet d'éviction.…”