In The Nature of the Firm, Ronald Coase explains how firms represent a suspension of the market mechanism. The allocation of activities depends on the relative costs of organizing activities within the firm versus direct reliance on the market. Despite Coase’s insight, economists often treat...

This study addresses the determinants of time-to-licensing, defined as the elapsed time between the disclosure of an invention and the signed licensing contract, and its impact on the commercial success of the licensed inventions from public research. Using a dataset containing detailed...

This paper explores the characteristics of persistent academic inventors and how they are influenced by their personal attributes, PhD institution, and first invention. Using a novel dataset on 555 UK academic inventors, we find that the quality of the first invention is the best predictor for...

The external circumstances for universities have been changing rapidly. In order to be competitive, survive, and flourish, universities have shown a growing enthusiasm to generate financial revenues externally. The literature refers to this phenomenon as academic capitalism, defined as the...

Collaboration over distance is difficult to maintain in innovation projects which require a great deal of regional collaboration. However, patent documents reveal that a number of inventor teams are able to overcome long distances. Earlier literature started to investigate factors, which...

The paper compares academic and corporate patents in Germany to shed light on the geographical distribution of the inventors. The residences of the inventors show different patterns in the two datasets. Furthermore, we analyze the spatial distance between inventors for patents invented in...

This study is a quantitative analysis of Japanese patent information to examine the changes in the nature and the outcome of universityindustry collaborations (UICs) following the enactment of UIC policies in the late 1990s. By considering UIC patents not only in joint universityindustry patent...

In recent decades firms have intensified the exploration of external sources of knowledge to enhance their innovation capabilities. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors that affect the importance of academic knowledge for firms’ innovative activities. An integrated approach...

As university involvement in technology transfer and entrepreneurship has increased, concerns over the patenting and licensing of scientific discoveries have grown. This paper examines the effect that the licensing of academic patents has on journal citations to academic publications covering...