Академический Документы
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Martin Meyer
K
Academic patents may be a more accurate meas- EITH PAVITT (1998) RAISED THE
ure of inventive output generated by academics question whether patents reflect the useful
than university-owned patents. Using Finnish research output of universities. His answer
data, a comparative analysis suggests that num- was rather skeptical. Based on earlier analyses,
ber of academic patents is higher not only than Pavitt concluded, university patents give a partial
and distorted picture of the contributions university
the number of university-owned patents but also
research makes to technical change:
than patents citing domestic science. Also differ-
ent linkage intensities could be identified. The Patenting by universities is not a potentially
second part of the study tries to identify areas for useful measure of university research perform-
further analysis and introduces some results with ance, because there is so little of it, and because
respect to concentration of academic inventive it offers a very restricted and distorted picture
activity, academic contributions to national pat- of the contributions of university research to
enting and utilization of patented inventions. Fi- practical applications. This is because, in gen-
nally, limitations and applicability of the overall eral, university research feeds into invention
approach are discussed. and innovation, and is not a substitute for it.
This is why measures of the contributions of
university research to patenting activity is a
more fruitful line of enquiry. (Pavitt, cited after
working paper, pages 10-11)
Research Evaluation April 2003 0958-2029/03/010017-011 US$08.00 Beech Tree Publishing 2003 17
Academic patents
related to universities by their inventors rather than transfer modes in universities: Technology transfer
university ownership. For this purpose, data on Fin- in the direct mode takes place between academic
nish academic and university-owned patents as well inventor and an interested third party. No technology
as patent citations of Finnish scientific papers in transfer organization at the university is involved
Finnish publications are presented. The findings substantially. In the mediated mode, the technology
confirm Pavitt’s skepticism about university-owned transfer office is involved in utilizing the research
patents but also indicate that academic patents can since the university or related organizations own the
be an alternative and less distorted measure of uni- intellectual property rights (IPR). Finally, there is
versity researchers’ contribution to technological the intermediary mode in which universities do not
development than patents owned by universities. In own the IPR to the invention but the transfer office
the particular case of Finland, academic patents ap- is involved as a facilitator of transfer assuming the
pear to establish a stronger linkage between univer- role of an ‘innovation agent’.
sity science and technology than even patent
citations. Country differences
University ownership
of IPR
‘Mediated mode’
who happen to have the same name as the inventor Finnish scientific articles that are cited in Finnish
but are not related to the patent in any other way, a US patents leads to a greater number of science-
manual validation procedure is necessary.3 The vali- related patents. All in all, 282 (of 61,000) Finnish
dation procedure identified links based on homo- SCI papers were cited by 99 (of 6,800) Finnish US
nyms only, which were removed subsequently. For patents in the non-patent references section. This
this purpose, we tried to contact all potential inven- number is higher than the number of university-
tors in our lists by telephone, email or fax. The con- owned patents we found.
tacted individuals had to confirm that they were (one Where they occurred, citations linked the scien-
of) the inventor(s) before a patent was considered to tific domains of molecular biology, medical and car-
be ‘university-related’. diovascular research with technological areas of
biotechnology and pharmaceuticals/cosmetics. The
Identifying patent citations main field of chemicals/pharmaceuticals accounts
for 213 of the 280 classified citations (see Table 1).
Not unlike linking academics as inventors to patents, Instruments-related patents contain 41 patent cita-
identifying patent citations requires matching certain tions, mostly in the areas of analysis, measurement
data sets. For the purpose of this research, search and control. These results are not surprising since all
keys were defined for each record in the Finnish fields of technology that have citation links to the
publication database (journal, volume, publication scientific journal literature are said to be highly sci-
year, beginning and end pages). The search keys for ence-related. Surprisingly, an area of high technol-
each publication were traced in the ‘other refer- ogy, such as telecommunications, appears to have
ences’ section of the patent documents. The author only relatively weak connections with the journal
draws on data kindly provided by Olle Persson of literature. This raises the question whether this area
Inforsk at Umeå University. is really not related to the science base at all or
whether one can track this connection in a different
way.
Results
Patented inventions by university researchers
This section first presents the patents that are identi-
fied by examining the universities or their transfer Previous research also explored other ways of link-
organizations or public sources of funding as the ing science and technology. For instance, Coward
owner of the patent. Then a comparison with patent and Franklin (1989) investigated the science-
citations follows. After this, patented inventions will technology interface by combining two sets of quan-
be introduced that were found by tracing university titative data by defining the ‘science universe’, de-
researchers listed as inventors in patents. fining the ‘technology universe’ and identifying the
‘intersect’. Three possible types of patent-paper in-
Patents owned by the universities tersections were investigated:
The search for university-owned patents confirmed 1. individual name matches between patent inven-
the results Pavitt (1998) reported for the UK. A tors and paper authors;
search in the USPTO online database identified 36 2. institutional name matches between patent assign-
patents that were owned by the universities,4 their ees and organizations listed as affiliations by au-
transfer companies (Aboatech, Oulutech, Licentia, thors; and
Tamlink, Helsinki University Licensing) or public 3. examiner-cited literature references found in pat-
R&D-related funding institutions (such as SITRA, ents and base literature papers from the model.
Tekes, the Academy of Finland). This example illus-
trates why scholars have criticized university-owned The authors concluded that author-inventor name
patents as a weak and distorted indicator of science- matches appear to be the best approach.
technology linkage or useful academic research. Inspired by this approach and similar studies,5 we
However, the number of science-related patents in- tried to devise a matching scheme that relates inven-
creases if one tracks patents that cite scientific pa- tor names to the names of researchers. Linking pat-
pers and differs even more if one defines university ents to inventors who are scientists seems to be a
patents as patents that were invented by at least one more appropriate way of tracing inventive activity in
university researcher. universities than tracking patents that are owned by
universities. Even in countries where universities
Patent citation analysis own the rights to researchers’ inventions, universi-
ties may have transferred the ownership of the patent
In his 1998 paper, Keith Pavitt mentioned that patent to a company. Therefore, it seems more reasonable
citation analysis would be a less distorting indicator to identify patents that are invented by researchers
of science-technology linkage than university-owned working in academe than using patents assigned to
patents are. He referred to a range of studies (owned by) universities if one wants to track useful
pioneered by Francis Narin. Indeed, a search for research output of universities.6
Applying such an approach results in a substan- sector in this area, accounting for almost 38% of all
tially higher number of patents that can be related to patent citations, followed by pharmaceuticals and
universities than does identifying patents owned by cosmetics with about 22%. Instruments are the larg-
universities and their funding agencies or identifying est sector outside the life-science/chemicals cluster
patents that cite (domestic) science. A total of 530 with a share of more than 11% of the patent cita-
US patents were related to Finnish university re- tions. Information and communication technologies
searchers in this manner. Compared to the total (ICT), however, account for less than 2% of all pat-
number of Finnish utility patents in our database, ent citations.
this amounts to a share of at least 8%. The total in-
ventive activity of university researchers may be
even higher since Table 2. University-related patents by technological sector
60%
Patents
50%
40%
30%
Academic patents, if defined as patents
20%
invented by at least one university
researcher, seem to be an alternative 10%
100%
90%
80%
70%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Inventors (accum. %)
All Universities Helsinki University of Technology University of Helsinki
University of Turku University of Oulu Tampere University of Technology
to handle patenting and further commercialization as patents are specialized in a given field to the share
they wish. In most areas patents play only a secon- the field has in terms of all national patenting. Fig-
dary role in evaluating the individual researcher or ure 4 presents the results of this analysis.
the research unit. Hence, it seems reasonable to as- The x-axis depicts the share of the university-
sume that academic patents are concentrated on a related patents in total Finnish patenting in each of
small number of academic inventors. the 30 technological areas, divided by the aggregate
The data also confirms this suggestion. Key in- share of university-related patents in all the fields. In
ventors seem to account for most of university- other words, the relative importance of academic
related inventiveness. Figure 3 shows the concentra- patents in each field is illustrated (in a national con-
tion of patents for a selected number of Finnish uni- text). The y-axis shows the share of each technologi-
versities. The x-axis describes the accumulated cal area in relation to all national patents. This
percentage of inventors (in descending order), while indicates the importance of each area with respect to
the y-axis gives the accumulated percentage of pat- a country’s patenting.
ents. This way one can see what percentage of in- Four sectors can be distinguished:
ventors invented a certain percentage of patents. For
instance, for all the universities that are included in • The core contributions describe technological
this study, one can say that the most active 10% of fields in which university-related patents are con-
the inventors in Finnish universities account for siderably specialized and that account for a rela-
more than a third of the university-related patents. tively large share of all university-related
About 20% of the inventors accounted for half of the patenting activity.
university-related patents. • Background contributions are made in areas
However, there are considerable differences be- where overall patenting activity is comparably
tween the universities. For instance, while the top high but university-related inventiveness is not as
10% of the inventors at Oulu University account for strong.
more than 40% of the patents associated with this • When there is little patenting, university research-
university, the top 10% of inventors from Turku ers can make niche contributions. In this instance
University account for a quarter of the patents. they are relatively specialized.8
• Marginal contributions are made in those tech-
Contributions to national patenting nologies where both overall and university-related
activities are relatively low.
Patents are not the primary output of universities but
what is the impact of academic patents on the na- Biotechnology, pharmaceuticals/cosmetics, semi-
tional economy? Is it possible to define areas in conductors and organic chemistry are areas in which
which universities contribute over-proportionally to academic patents make niche contributions. Back-
national patenting? One way of addressing these ground contributions are made in medical engineer-
issues is by relating the degree to which academic ing, analysis/measurement/control, macromolecular
18%
18%
Backgroun
Background Core
Core
TEL
TEL Contribution
contributions Contribution
contributions
16%
16%
14%
14%
12%
12%
10%
10% MAP
MA
Patent Share**
P
8%
8% ANA
ANA
6%
6% MCT
MC
EDE
ED Niche
Niche
T MED
ME
4%
4% E contributions
Contribution
SUC
SU D
INT
INTC MAC
MAC
2%
2% MET
ME Marginal ORG
OR BIO
EPT
EP CPP
CP BIO PHA
PHA
Contributions
contributions
AGR AVT T
AGR TAVT OPT
OP
G
0%
0% P SEM
SE
0.5 1.0
T
1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5
Specialization*
chemistry/polymers, telecommunications, electrical while this area accounts for less than 13% of all aca-
devices/electrical engineering, materials processing demic patents. In other words, academic patents are
and machine tools. Marginal contributions can be related to the telecommunications field but the Fin-
associated with optics, surfaces engineering, chemi- nish economy as a whole is even more specialized in
cal and petrol industry/basic materials chemistry, this area than university patents. It is important to
materials and metallurgy, information technology, bear in mind that this analysis is made in a national
audiovisual technology, agriculture/food and envi- context. If one were to compare specializations
ronment/pollution. There is no area in which aca- across countries on an international basis, the results
demic patents appear to make critical contributions would most probably be different.
in the national context. Finally, one should remember when interpreting
This finding and the fact that telecommunications this type of data that only direct inventive output of
patents do not appear to make a ‘critical contribution’ university researchers was tracked. Several authors
appears somewhat counter-intuitive and requires rightly point to the many and multifaceted other con-
more detailed interpretation. Pharmaceuticals/ tributions science and scientists make to technical
cosmetics and biotechnology are defined as areas in development (see e.g. Brooks, 1994; Salter and Mar-
which university researchers exhibit a relatively high tin, 2001).
degree of inventive activity yet appear to limit them-
selves to niche contributions only. However, com- Utilization of academic patents
pared to other technological areas, biotechnology and
pharmaceuticals do not (yet?) have the same weight Patent data as we retrieved it can help identify key
as other fields that are more established in the Finnish institutions and key individuals as well as the extent
economy. Here one must bear in mind the time lag to which academics contribute to inventiveness in
that is associated with US patents used in this analy- different technological areas. However, another im-
sis. The examination of life-science patents can take portant question especially since the advent of
between five and seven years, which is longer than the notions, such as the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (e.g.
patent examination lasts in other fields.
Finland has the reputation of being one of the
most ICT-intensive economies (see e.g. Kuusisto
and Meyer, 2002). Therefore, the categorization of Patent data can help identify key
telecommunications as an area in which academic institutions and key individuals as well
patents have the role of background contributions
seems problematic, especially since the previous as the extent to which academics
section indicated that telecommunications is the area contribute to inventiveness in different
with the most academic patents. In this context one technological areas
should bear in mind that the share of telecommuni-
cations among all Finnish patents is higher than 16%
Table 3. Top three assignees of academic patents Orion Corporation follows with 6.8% of all patents,
(by university)
closely followed by Valmet with 6.6%. The top three
assignees account for a share of 24.1% compared to
University Top 3 assignee organizations all patents.
(in alphabetical order)
Tracing ‘unassigned’ patents
A Ahlstrom – Kone – Wartsila
B University Licensing – Orion – Soundek
C Fortum – Instrumentarium – Nokia Another approach toward tracing the exploitation of
D Nokia – Orion – Valio academic inventions (or the lack of it) is to track
E Nokia – Orion – Valmet
F Leiras – Orion – Wallac ‘unassigned’ patents; that is, those patents for which
G Biocon – Bionx Implants – Kone no assignee, or owner, is listed. In many but not all
All universities Nokia – Orion – Valmet cases,9 the analyst can usually assume that the pat-
ent belongs to the inventors.
There are considerable variations between the
universities. For instance, there are a small number
Etzkowitz, 2002; Etzkowitz et al, 2000), relates to of universities with a few patents where all of them
the extent to which academic inventiveness trans- were assigned to a company or other organization. In
lates into academic entrepreneurship. Case studies other cases, however, a considerable number of
indicated that academics may have the capacity to patents are still owned by individual inventors. In
act in an entrepreneurial style (certainly when secur- one instance, 45.5% of all academic patents were not
ing research funding) but may have trouble becom- directly owned by a company. In three other cases,
ing entrepreneurs in a commercial environment (e.g. the rate was between a quarter to a third of all pat-
Meyer, 2003). In which way can an examination of ents related to the respective universities. Figure 5
academic patents further our understanding of com- illustrates for a selection of Finnish universities the
mercialization processes? extent to which academic patents are ‘unassigned’.
While the data indicates differences between uni-
Tracking assignees of academic patents versity and to some extent fields (the two universi-
ties with the highest rate of unassigned patents are
Following academic patents to their owners should specialized in the life sciences), interpreting the data
give the analyst an idea about the extent to which aca- remains a challenge. Can one simply assume that
demic inventions are utilized in start-up companies. A such a patent is owned by individual researchers
look at the assignee data, however, indicates that most who utilize it? If so, what could one say about the
of the university-related patents appear to be as- mode of utilization? Or, could one not just as well
signed to large companies. Table 3 lists the most fre- interpret the lack of a corporate owner as a lack of
quent assignee firms for a selection of Finnish economic use?
universities as well as for all university-related pat- The patent data here is ambiguous. It shows
ents. Mostly large firms are engaged in patent-based where individuals own the patents and a corporate
collaboration with university researchers. Start-up user of the inventions is not immediately visible.
companies are only ranking among the best three in However, this does not mean individual inventors
very few instances. A university licensing company is have not licensed the patent to one or several com-
also strong in one instance. However, large firms ap- panies for further utilization, or use it in their own,
pear to dominate the picture otherwise. At the aggre- private firm. Here, one would need to go beyond a
gate level for all universities, Nokia is the top pure analysis of patent data and follow up inventions
assignee with 10.7% of the total amount of patents. through a survey approach.
50%
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Figure 5. Share of ‘unassigned’ patents for selected Finnish universities
PHA Pharmaceuticals, cosmetics SUC Surfaces, coating THE Thermal processes and apparatus
BIO Biotechnology INT Information technology HAP Handling, printing
SEM Semiconductors EDE Electrical devices – electrical MEC Mechanical elements
ORG Organic, fine chemistry engineering GEN General technological processes
MED Medical engineering AVT Audiovisual technology AFM Agricultural and food machinery
MAC Macromolecular chemistry, polymers AGR Agriculture, food and apparatus
ANA Analysis, measurement, control EPT Engines, pumps, turbines NUC Nuclear engineering
CPP Chemical industry and petrol industry, TEL Telecommunications TRA Transport
basic materials chemistry MCT Machine tools CON Consumer goods and equipment
OPT Optics MAP Material processing CIV Civil engineering, building, mining
MET Materials, metallurgy ENV Environment, pollution SPW Space technology, weapons
Note: The technological areas are based on a classification originally developed by the Fraunhofer Institute in Karlsruhe and the
French OST in collaboration with INPI. The scheme is based on the International Patent Classification and provides a more
aggregated view of patenting by distinguishing thirty technological sectors. For more detailed information on how the subclasses
of the IPC are categorized in technological sectors, see OECD (1994), The measurement of scientific and technological activities
using patent data as science and technology indicators. Patent Manual (1994) (OECD, Paris) OCDE/GD(94)114.
Research Evaluation April 2003 0958-2029/03/010017-011 US$08.00 Beech Tree Publishing 2003 27