Essays on entrepreneurial transference of technology and patenting

Abstract

The present dissertation consists of five studies on entrepreneurial transference of technology and patenting in the framework of industrial engineering. The focus is to show how the pattern of innovative behavior pursued by firms is determinant in several phases of the firm's lifecycle, starting with chapter 1 which consists of an introductory paper around the role of academies as accelerators of knowledge exploitation, their flows on the translation of science results into privately appropriable knowledge. The first paper makes a review of the theoretical background on the topics of technology transfer and innovation, taking as references the US and the European experiences. It functions as a theoretical basis for framing out a set of innovative papers on the general topic of entrepreneurial transference of technology and patenting. Chapter 2 studies the impact of a set of determinants for assessing the academic patent's value, based on two samples, 281 patents from Cambridge University, UK, and 160 patents from Carnegie Mellon University, US. Here, size of the patent family impacts positively on the value of the academic patent and the time to maturity and the geographical scope denote a negative influence. In addition, for spin-off firms from Carnegie Mellon University, the impact of geographical scope tends to be negative and significant. For the Cambridge University spin-offs, two main effects are detected, firstly, a negative and significant effect of time to maturity and secondly a positive and significant impact of the technical field on the patent's value. Chapter 3 analyzes the determinants behind the firms’ innovative behavior and their coopetition dynamics, by using a dataset of 3682 manufacturing firms and 1221 service firms from the European Community Innovation Survey (CIS), 2008. Results reveal that the manufacturing and service firms' capacity to generate product and service innovations denote a significant influence for sustaining an innovative behavior. In fact, coopetition arrangements between competitors and other R&D stakeholders and the firm's capacity to introduce innovations into the market are major drivers of innovative performance. Furthermore, service firms denote that the introduction of process innovations inside the firm and the internal R&D activities are of major importance for spurring the firm's capacity to generate innovations. Chapter 4 analyzes the firm's growth determinants, going a little bit further than previous studies by introducing proxies such as IP rights transactions, e.g., in-licensing activities and out-licensing activities, making use of a sample of 818 firms (high-tech and medium high-tech) created in 2004 and tracked by the Kauffman Foundation in the subsequent six years xii period. The main conclusions point out there is a significant and positive impact of R&D intensity and of the in-license of external patents on the firm’s growth. Additionally, there is a negative and significant effect of the squared R&D intensity on the growth path of the firm, which reveals a U-inverted relationship to firm’s growth, that is, a positive impact on firm growth in an early stage, followed by a negative impact after achieving the optimal level. This impact is also reflected when we control for the activity sector, having a major effect on high-tech manufacturing industries and high-tech knowledge intensive service firms. Finally in the fifth chapter, the research focus is about the determinants of firm's growth and success and the prediction of the major factors that affect their survival avoiding exit. The sample we use is a sample of 4928 firms created in 2004 and followed by the Kauffman Foundation in the subsequent six years period. A special attention is devoted to the gazelle firms, since they are a key agent in the scope of the knowledge based entrepreneurial economy. From one side, we analyze the firms’ characteristics like age, size, IP intensity (namely, patents, copyrights and trademarks) and, from the other side, we study a set of founders’ traits, namely, age, work experience, educational background and gender, which are able to affect business survival. Results show that being a manufacturing gazelle which undertakes a corporate strategy oriented at innovation intensity is less probable to exit than the opposite. Conversely, the IPR portfolio of the firm (mainly patents and copyrights) denotes an important effect on its survival ratios. Furthermore, the paper denotes that small firms with more or less 4 years, whose founders, mainly males, with no university degree and with more than 35 years old are significantly more predictive of surviving than other firms.