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Academic contribution to industrial innovation by funding type

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Abstract

Universities are an important actor for innovation. Their contributions to technological and scientific knowledge development have been supported by various types of funding. The current study investigates the impacts of two academic research funding sources—industry and competitive—on academic patents. We measure the effects with two indicators—creation of progenitor inventions and the degree of diffusion. Using a patent database, this paper identifies a progenitor invention if a patent is granted without any backward citations and measures the degree of diffusion with patent citations. Focusing on Japanese university patents, the main finding of this paper is that competitive funding tends to produce progenitor inventions whereas industry funding is not likely to do so. By contrast, inventions produced from competitive funding are not likely to diffuse, whereas those produced from industry funding are likely to diffuse. Based on our findings, we argue that the competitive funding may work better when diffusion mechanism is introduced. An example is to increase academic researchers’ proximity to the industry. Additionally, our findings also imply that when setting new funding or changing academic funding system such as replacing block funding with other types, it is important to understand what kind of outcomes are expected from the funding method.

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Source: Authors’ calculation

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Source: Authors’ calculation

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Notes

  1. Rarely, competitive funding bodies in Japan have a commercialization guidelines and mention ownership. However, it is not sure if the guideline is more rhetoric or will be implemented.

  2. https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-grants/data/handbook.pdf.

  3. Grants-in-Aid Scientific Research Database (the KAKEHNHI database): https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/.

  4. As the patent outcomes from KAKENHI-funded projects are declared by researchers, concerns might exist regarding an excessive disclosure of their outcomes (reporting patent outcomes produced from other sources as outcomes of KAKENHI-funded projects). “Appendix 1” analyzes this issue, and we assume that excessive disclosure is not a critical concern in the current study.

  5. For example, the “Comprehensive Survey on Patent Applications Based on Inventions by National University Researchers,” report by the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), Japan. Available at http://www.nistep.go.jp/wp/wp-content/uploads/NISTEP-RM266-FullJ.pdf.

  6. We used the Japanese inventor-disambiguation database to distinguish different inventors with the same names (Ikeuchi et al., 2017), as using this database increases reliability.

  7. The normalized method of forward citations is questionable sometimes. Patents in the same application year may result in different publication/granted year; thus they get different cited periods. However, this concern is applicable if patent citations are added only by applicants and inventors. However, in the Japanese patent system, patent citations are added by patent examiners. Accordingly, examiners begin adding patent citations before publication and grant. Accordingly, we would like to point out that in our research setting (case of Japan), normalization with the same application year is more precise. Usage of examiner citations is sometimes better because examiner citations has less concern in self citations than inventor citations (Alcácer and Gittelman 2006).

  8. Before 2004, academic researchers in Japanese national universities were treated as employees of the Japanese government. Therefore, patent outcomes from national universities were occasionally assigned to the government. Alternatively, academic researchers in public and private universities were university employees, and therefore, patent outcomes in public and private universities were assigned to these institutions.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their time and efforts to review this paper. The earlier version of this paper is available as NISTEP discussion paper No. 161 (https://www.nistep.go.jp/wp/wp-content/uploads/NISTEP-DP161-FullJ.pdf). All remaining errors are our own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan

    Byeongwoo Kang

  2. Department of Technology Management for Innovation, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Kazuyuki Motohashi

  3. National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, Tokyo, Japan

    Byeongwoo Kang & Kazuyuki Motohashi

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  1. Byeongwoo Kang
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Correspondence to Byeongwoo Kang.

Appendices

Appendix 1

The current study uses patent outcomes from the KAKENHI-funded projects declared by researchers. As academic researchers are involved in many simultaneous projects and conduct all research projects in parallel, concerns may exist that the patent outcomes reported in KAKENHI-funded projects might be research outcomes from other funding sources.

This appendix confirms whether such concerns are applicable by analyzing how many patent outcomes invented by the KAKENHI recipients were actually reported as outcomes of KAKENHI-funded projects.

Among all the patent applications by Japanese universities, nearly all (46,308 out of 48,646) were invented by academic researchers who have received the KAKENHI funds. This may imply that academic researchers receiving these funds conduct most of their applied research in Japan.

Among the 46,308 patent applications by these academic researchers, 10,048 were filed by academic researchers who did not receive KAKENHI funds, while 36,260 were filed by academic researchers who received these funds. Further, among the patent applications filed when the KAKENHI funds were granted, only a small portion (6262 out of 36,260 patent applications) were reported as outcomes of KAKENHI-funded projects. In other words, most were not reported as outcomes of these projects.

From this analysis, we conclude that the KAKENHI recipients have properly reported their research outcomes, and patent outcomes in our study do not exaggerate the KAKENHI reports (Fig. 6, Table 15).

Fig. 6
figure 6

Patent outcomes between KAKENHI funding recipients and others

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Table 15 Patent outcomes reported by researchers who have received KAKENHI funding
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Appendix 2

Academic patenting is not a recent phenomenon in Japan. Before 2004, academic patenting in Japan had adopted an “inventorist” approach, in that the entity that held the rights to its employee inventions should be deemed the inventor. This way of thinking had been adopted in Japan since Japanese patent law was revised in 1921. All private sectors consider the interests of users and employers who directly or indirectly subsidized the invention activity, and the rights to an employee’s invention were assigned to the employers to a certain extent. However, the rights to academic patents in the academic sector were not automatically assigned to employers, whether this involved the government or the university.Footnote 8 For example, only around 15% of all patent outcomes in national universities were assigned to the government before 2004 (Table 16). Consequently, most academic patent applicants during this period were inventors themselves. Additionally, even if UIC projects during this period resulted in patent outcomes, universities did not appear as applicants on patent documents; instead, firms were listed as the only applicants on patent documents, and the academic researchers as well as firms’ employee inventors involved in UIC projects appeared as the inventors.

Table 16 Assignment of patent applications in Japanese national universities.
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Kang, B., Motohashi, K. Academic contribution to industrial innovation by funding type. Scientometrics 124, 169–193 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03420-w

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