The role of patenting activity for scientific research: A study of academic inventors from China's nanotechnology

Abstract

Scientists from universities are becoming more proactive in their efforts to commercialize research results. Patenting, as an important channel of university knowledge transfer, has initiated a controversy on potential effects for the future of scientific research. This paper contributes to the growing study on the relationship between patenting and publishing among faculty members with China's evidence in the field of nanotechnology. Data from top 32 most prolific universities in patenting are used to examine the relationship, consisting of 6321 confirmed academic inventors who both publish and patent over the time period 1991–2008. By controlling for heterogeneity of patenting activities, patenting experience, institutional affiliation and collaboration with foreign researchers, the findings in China's nanotechnology generally support earlier investigations concluding that patenting activity does not adversely affect research output. Patenting, however, has negative impacts on both quantity and quality of university researchers’ publication output, when the assignee lists include corporations or scientists themselves.

Introduction

The interacting university–industry relationship has been recognized by not only scholars but also policymakers or practitioners as one of the most important characteristics in a knowledge-based economy. Scientific activities have increasingly played an important role in industrial innovation and more firms are relying on external sources of scientific knowledge generated mainly by universities. Besides other channels of university knowledge transfer like consulting, sponsored research, licensing and spin-offs, university patenting has long been a topic of keen interest in the literature and policy initiatives. The past few years has seen a surge in the number of patents which are generated by academic scientists and granted to universities. More and more scientists produce results which can be both published in academic journals and applied for filing patents.

In recent years, the growing studies have focused on investigating the impacts of academic patenting for the future scientific research. Although the understanding of the effects of university patenting on scientific research remains open to debate theoretically, a large body of empirical studies on evaluating statistically the relationship between patenting and publishing have provided strong evidence that there is no negative effect of patenting activities on publication output of individual academic scientists, especially for star scientists (Agrawal and Henderson, 2002, Azoulay et al., 2006, Azoulay et al., 2007, Breschi et al., 2007, Breschi et al., 2008, Buenstorf, 2009, Calderini et al., 2007, Carayol and Matt, 2004, Fabrizio and Di Minin, 2008, Meyer, 2006a, Meyer, 2006b, Murray and Stern, 2007, Van Looy et al., 2006). The general finding is that patenting activity does not affect publishing activities. Meyer, 2006a, Meyer, 2006b showed that patenting faculty members apparently outperform their non-patenting peers in terms of both quantity and quality of publication in the field of nanotechnology.

As Klitkou and Gulbrandsen (in press) point, the impacts of patenting activity and other types of commercialization for the scientific output are highly context-dependent in the national, university or disciplinary level. A large body of investigations or case studies have concentrated on developed economies, e.g. Meyer (2006a) for three European countries, Murray and Stern (2007) for US, Czarnitzki, Glänzel, and Hussinger (2009) for Germany, Breschi et al. (2008) for Italy, Klitkou and Gulbrandsen (in press) for Norway and Chang and Yang (2008) for Taiwan. Little is known, however, about China's status. To address this, we examined the effects of faculty patenting behavior in a panel dataset of nanotechnology scientists employed at Chinese 32 universities. These universities are representative because they are most prolific in patenting with the patent number larger than 50 during the period of 1991–2008. This field was chosen for three reasons. First, it is widely acknowledged that nanotechnology, as an emerging and rapidly evolving field with the multidisciplinary nature, is perceived as proximate fields of science and technology (Meyer, 2006b). Scientists engaging in this field may have the disciplinary advantage of both publishing and patenting their discoveries. Second, scientific research and technological development in China's nanotechnology has attracted considerable attention from scholars and policymakers all over the world in the past few years. China has emerged as one of the key global players in this field, producing the second largest number of nanotechnology papers following only the United States (Guan & Ma, 2007) and ranking third behind only the United States and Japan in terms of the number of nanotechnology patents granted (Liu & Zhang, 2005). Third, nanotechnology has been identified as a main component and a priority mission area in China's strategic plans for future developments in science and technology and has been given a high level of investment and significant support from central and local governments (Bai, 2005, Hassan, 2005). The reinforce effect or the conflict effect of patenting on future scientific research is increasingly central and of great interest to policy makers and university leaders. Therefore investigating an integrated quantitative perspective on this issue will provide an answer for them.

We focus on the following factors in the context of China. First, we attempt to explore a potential difference between different levels of supporting by governments, by considering whether a researcher comes from the key university and the State Key Laboratory. The key research universities have established themselves as an important source of knowledge for firms (Wu, in press). At the same time, the State Key Laboratories have played a vital role in China's scientific research system (Xue, 2006, Jin et al., 2006). Researchers from there are in a specialized and well-equipped environment and may face with better institutional culture. Second, China's patent laws are designed to grant Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) on public inventions to the employers emulating the Bayh-Dole Act.² The regulation on protecting IPRs of higher education institutions established by Ministry of Education also points that the IPRs of employment inventions produced by a researcher belongs to his affiliated university (Ministry of Education, 1999). Thus most patents invented by faculty members are granted to universities in China. However, there is still heterogeneity of patenting activity (Czarnitzki et al., 2009), such as patents assigned to corporations due to joint or contract research, and assigned to the scientist himself besides the university under certain agreements on sharing revenue. We explore the effects of heterogeneous patenting activities on the scientists’ publication output by distinguishing both instances. Third, international scientific collaborations should be controlled in our model since China has benefited greatly from international scientific collaborations in improving its research (Guan & Ma, 2007).

Following several studies on matching the data of publications and patents (Breschi et al., 2008, Boyack and Klavans, 2008, Meyer, 2006a, Meyer, 2006b), we established inventor–author links and confirmed 6321 academic inventors who both published and patented in the field of nanotechnology over the time period 1991–2008. To further explore the publishing–patenting relationship with respect to China's context, we performed the fixed effects Poisson model. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we summarize the empirical evidence on the relationship between patenting and publishing to develop our research hypotheses and also describe the related policies on academic patenting in China; Section 3 introduces China's nanotechnology. The dataset and the model used in the paper are described in Section 4. Section 5 presents the results and analysis. Section 6 discusses the findings and their implications; some directions for further study are suggested.