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What drives academic patentees to bypass TTOs? Evidence from a large public research organisation

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Abstract

This paper provides insights into the behavior of academic patentees who choose to bypass in-house Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs). TTOs have gained favor in recent years as academic institutions have tried to increase commercialization of their inventions. Using a large sample of researchers at a leading German public research organisation (PRO), results show that patentees in physical and life sciences, those with doctoral degrees, and those with greater job experience are more likely to bypass TTOs. Different forms of industry interactions, including working in industry, industry cooperation and industry consulting, all make TTO-bypassing more likely, with some interesting differences across gender. Further, as expected, academics favoring free public access to their research are less likely to bypass TTOs. On the other hand, internal leadership position as a research group leader, German citizenship and risk attitudes do no exert significant influences. Implications for technology transfer policies are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Link et al. (2007) term this informal technology transfer and consider three aspects: transfer of commercial technology, industrial consulting, and joint publications with industry researchers.

  2. Useful related surveys can be found in Lissoni (2012), Rothaermal et al. (2007) and Siegel et al. (2001).

  3. The federal German government launched a knowledge transfer initiative, “Knowledge Creates Markets,” in 2001. One of the actions of this initiative was the reform of a section of German employer-employee law (Arbeitnehmererfindungsgesetz) dealing with inventions by teaching faculty at universities (the so-called professor’s privilege). In 2002, a decision was made to change the ownership of IP within higher education institutes (HEI) by removing the exclusive ownership rights of researchers and transferring those rights to the employing organizations, though researchers retain rights to receive two-thirds of any licensing or other income from their invention (OECD 2003). With this reform the universities got ownership of the IP generated by their academics. Concerning cooperation projects with industry, the IP ownership depends on the agreement decided by the university and the industry at the beginning of the project (Audretsch and Göktepe-Hultén 2015).

  4. Although, TTOs might impose some additional transactions costs of their own.

  5. While we are considering a PRO, one related variable, especially in a university setting, which would be relevant is the tenure status of the respondent (see Link et al. (2007)).

  6. The influences of risk aversion on patenting are examined by Goel and Göktepe-Hultén (2017); also see Hamböck et al. (2017). More details on the variable RiskAverse are provided in Appendix B.

  7. Attitudes might also be shaped by past experience. Although not available in the current survey, a related variable of interest would be the respondent’s past experience in dealing with the TTO.

  8. This might alternately be termed as better understanding of internal versus external rewards.

  9. This is, of course, dictated also by the nature of the invention in question (i.e., whether process or product, etc.).

  10. Note that since risk aversion is likely to be correlated with perceptions about costs and with attitudes towards public access, we dropped RiskAverse from the models in Table 5. Plus, RiskAverse was statistically insignificant in Tables 2, 3 and 4.

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Acknowledgements

Comments by Dirk Dohse and Al Link and research assistance by Ashley Wessman are appreciated. Göktepe-Hultén acknowledges the financial support of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and KNOWSCIENCE Project, and Project leader Merle Jacob. An earlier version of this paper was circulated as a Kiel Working Paper #2079.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, 61790-4200, USA

    Rajeev K. Goel

  2. Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiel, Germany

    Rajeev K. Goel

  3. Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Devrim Göktepe-Hultén

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  1. Rajeev K. Goel
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Correspondence to Rajeev K. Goel.

Appendices

Appendix A

See Table 6.

Table 6 Correlation matrix of key variables
Full size table

Appendix B: Details on calculation of the RiskAverse variable

The survey question related to risk attitudes read as, “Imagine that you had won 100,000 Euros in the lottery. Almost immediately after you collect the winnings, you receive the following financial offer from a reputable bank. You may invest part or the full amount of your winnings under the following conditions. There is the chance to double the invested money within two years, but at the same time it is equally possible that you lose half of the amount invested. You have the opportunity to invest the full amount of 100,000, 80,000, 60,000, 40,000, 20,000 Euro or reject the offer. What share of your lottery winnings would you invest?

1. 100,000 Euro 2. 80,000 Euro 3. 60,000 Euro 4. 40,000 Euro 5. 20,000 Euro 6. Nothing, I would decline the offer.”

To construct the dummy variable, RiskAverse, responses 1–5 were coded risky or 0 as they take some risk, and 6 risk averse was coded 1.

See Goel and Göktepe-Hultén (2017) and Max Planck Society (2009) for additional details.

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Goel, R.K., Göktepe-Hultén, D. What drives academic patentees to bypass TTOs? Evidence from a large public research organisation. J Technol Transf 43, 240–258 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-017-9595-7

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